Tag: nostalgia

not a book

Not a Book: Darren Hayes

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You know how there are some songs or albums that can transport you back to a place or a time? Well Darren Hayes does that for me. I’m about to date myself a bit, but Savage Garden were the soundtrack to a lot of my teenage years. Sitting studying in my room, if I wasn’t listening to football commentaries on 5live I was probably listening to their second album, Affirmation.

One of my non-book New Year’s resolutions this year was to take the opportunity to go and do things and not say “maybe one day”. Well this ticket was already in the (virtual) ticket box at the turn of the year, but it is still a part of that. Darren Hayes last toured 13 years ago – and I thought it might never happen again. I have seen him before but was in 2006 – and a lot of things have changed since then – songs that were still new back then are now classics. Or at least I think they are. I bought the ticket months ago when they first went on sale because it’s been so long who knew when there might be another opportunity – his husband may be British but he is an Australian who has lived a lot in LA. Take your chances while you have them. The tour is called Do You Remember and is marking 25 years in music (gulp) and honestly, I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

I was meant to be going with a friend, but tonsillitis meant that I ended up solo, which given how emotional the whole thing made me is probably for the best as he might have wanted to disassociate himself from the snotty mess sitting next to him. I know I’m a crier, and I get emotional when good things happen (from athletes I like winning medals, to being offered a job I want) but this was something else. The best I can describe it is imagine going to see the artist who did your favourite teenage album a couple of decades on and then instead of doing obscure cuts or remixes, they play all your favourites, no messing around with them and sound just as good as they did on the record (but live!) – well this was that for me.

My photos may be pants and part of that is because I was at the top and the back, but it’s mostly because I was enjoying the moment and watching it unfold and I didn’t want to watch it through a phone screen when it was happening in front of me. I made some videos too but they’re even worse because I wasn’t actually watching what I was filming, I was watching the stage!

I have a few more “if not now when” things planned this year and if they come anywhere close to being as good as this, it’s going to be a great year. Now excuse me, I’m off to listen to the Affirmation album again.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

books, Children's books, Series I love

Children’s Bookshelf: The Drina books

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Paperback books in the Drina series
It took 20 years – but I finally have a matching set

I know exactly when I got my first Drina book – because when my mum gives people books, she always writes a message in them.  She gave me Ballet for Drina in June 1991 – when I was seven – to read while she was in hospital for an operation.  In the front she wrote that it was one of her favourite books when she was little – and I loved it as well from the moment I first read it and wanted the rest of the books in the series.  Several of the others in the series have inscriptions in them marking them as being holiday books from various trips around the south coast.  I’ve had the whole set since I was about 14 – but a couple of them didn’t match (smaller size! Different cover style!) and thanks to the wonders of eBay I got the “missing” matching books last year and was finally able to put them in order without the fretting over the fact that they didn’t look right!  As you can see they’re all very well-loved  – except Drina, Ballerina, one of the new additions, but I can assure you that my old copy is practically falling apart further down the shelf.

The Drina books are responsible for my childhood dream of being a ballerina – a dream which lead eight-year-old me to try to sew my own pointe shoes from an old cotton shirt from the ragbag, some loo roll and some hair ribbons!  Drina is also responsible for some notable mispronunciations in my vocabulary – from the say-it-how-you-see-it school of reading – to this day I still struggle to pronounce Igor as Eegor rather than Eye-gor. Particularly because my stepgran had a beautiful Persian Blue called eegor that I used to feed when I went to visit and I always associate names with the first person/animal I knew with that name…

For those of you who haven’t read the series, it’s the story of Andrina Adamo – known as Drina – an orphan who is being brought up by her grandparents and who finds out when she starts ballet lessons in the first book that her mother was actually famous ballerina, who was killed in a plane crash along with her husband on a flight to New York where she was due to dance.  Drina is desperate to be a ballet dancer – but wants to succeed on her own without any help (or hindrance) from her famous mother’s name.  At the start of the second book the family move to London for her grandfather’s job and Drina starts at ballet school.  The rest of the series follows Drina’s trials and tribulations in her quest to succeed – including overcoming her grandmother’s reluctance to let her follow in her mother’s footsteps,  twisted ankles, school rivalries, her grandfather’s health problems which lead to her having to spend time away from her training and falling in love (at 14) with a glamourous New Yorker a couple of years older than her called Grant.

It’s hard to pick favourites – but I think mine are Drina Dances Again – where she plays Little Clara in The Nutcracker and Mr Dominick and Madame Volonaise find out Drina’s closely guarded secret about her mother’s identity; Drina Dances in Paris – where Drina goes to dance in The Nutcracker in Paris and Grant (the New Yorker) comes to visit her, Drina Dances on Tour – where her big secret finally comes out, she joins the company, experiences what it’s like to be in the corps de ballet and where Grant arrives in London and comes to find her and Drina, Ballerina which sees the series end with her dancing her mother’s most famous role and marrying Grant.

Looking back at what I’ve written, it sounds like a very far-fetched tale, but then how many children’s stories aren’t! I read them over and over when I was younger, and even as a teenager when I was poorly I’d get out my Drina books and start reading them all over again.  Even today, just flicking through them so that I could write this post I’ve come over with the urge to sit down with them and have another read.

Looking at Amazon, I don’t think they’re in print anymore – which is a real shame – because there are still as many ballet mad little girls out there as there always were.

But that does lead me to another thought that has crossed my mind more than once – I am part of the last generation who will read these sort of stories and be able to see my own life in them?  For all that Ballet for Drina was written in 1957, it was very similar to my own life – a world with no mobile phones or home computers and where most houses only had one TV – although flying wasn’t the big deal that it was in Drina and liners had stopped being a method of getting to New York by the early 90s.  The same applies to a lot of the school stories I used to read (many of which I’m sure I’ll post about in due course) – the only difference between my life and theirs was that their trains ran on coal and that they called maths arithmetic.  Will today’s children – who’ve grown up with smart phones, iPads, laptops, the internet and Playstations be able to buy into these stories the same way?  I hope so, because I know how much enjoyment and knowledge I got from them when I was little.