hymysll by Simon Aulman

Yes this is another of my gentle highly-lofi "Hym...." rural electronic albums full of little tracks that took moments to make and would've each sounded a lot worse if they'd taken all day. I like this one. But then I like them all. It's maybe most similar to the first of these "Hym..." albums - it is much more to the "ambient" and moody way of being, and it contains no obvious crowd-pleasers, but nor does it try to piss anyone off, and I think it keeps its mood largely in shape - that melancholy mood that I find rather pleasurable. Nowadays it's a mood that most people would call "boredom". But I never get/feel bored.

This morning it was my mother's funeral. I didn't go. This isn't because I hated her or anything - I didn't hate her. I just felt nothing for her. She chose not to love her children or her husband or anyone at all - just herself - and at the end of her life she was admirably accepting of the consequences - that if you don't love people, they don't love you back.

Mum had many other admirable qualities - a great sense of humour, always at someone's expense, sometimes her own. She was very intelligent - but coming from a very poor family she had to leave school at 14 and start work - and she loved work - and she never became a housewife or wasted any time on domesticity etc.

Though mum was the cause of almost all of the family's problems, I much preferred her to dad. And her/their total careless disregard for their children meant that we were free to live the kind of wild outdoor existence that children lived then, and children now cannot even start to imagine.

Family life was miserable. But I spent virtually no time living with my family. This morning, while my mum's body was being talked-over and then incinerated, I was walking around town, then sitting in parks eating fruit and chatting. People keep predicting that mum's death "will catch up with me one day". But honestly I know that they are wrong. If I never felt a thing for her during our decades of sharing this land, then why should her passing catch up with me? - there had been years and years when we'd never seen one another, and I'd never thought of her.

And once I get a handle on all of her crap/clutter/"legacy" and have found a way to throw it all away, there will never be another thought of her. Almost. There are two planets in the universe. There is the planet where family-life is happy, and there is the planet where family-life is miserable. The inhabitants of one planet cannot speak the language of the other planet, or understand it.

A few years ago, at one of my book-clubs, I chose Jeanette Winterson's "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" - I'd already read it and I'd loved it, god it was soooo true to life, about how awful and controlling and selfish-selfish-selfish and narcissistic Jeanette's mother had been. Jeanette's mother was even worse than mine. Mine was more like the mother described in Deborah Orr's almost-as-brilliant "Motherwell".

Surely everyone at my bookclub would love Jeanette's book as much as I did. But no - everyone hated it - or, at best, was totally baffled by it. And I realised - they'd all had happy or happy-ish upbringings - and for them the events in Jeanette's book were as weird as some crazy sci-fi fantasy. So if you think that failing to bother to travel a few miles to go to your own mother's funeral is an odd thing to do, well you are very lucky. But I feel very lucky too. It was an amazing experience - I even knew it at the time. Even when I was doing things that people did back then when they were supposedly bored, I was never bored.

And her parents were brilliant too - my favourite fabulous grandparents - and while sifting thru all of mum's crap, it is the moments when I come across stuff about/by/from Nana and Grandad that I do feel something - grandad was an artist, not as good as my wife, but after he left Esso he made a tolerable living from it, and most of all I love the pen and ink drawings he did as a young man when he was still learning and which I'd never seen before and which are now starting to cover my walls.

...............

recorded over the past couple of weeks, photo somewhere in hampshire recently.