Grief, electric dreams, excellent human

Approximately-weekly news, #83

One of the things that Lou and I had in common was our love for gift-giving: finding exactly the right thing to give someone brought us both great satisfaction, and was one of our ways of saying, I love you, I see you, I’m glad to have you in my life. For her last Christmas, she gave me a stone dragon* to guard me, a brooch from the 1920s to commemorate the House Of Eliott watchathon we did when she was too unwell to get out of bed, and this t-shirt, from Disko Kids.

If ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ doesn’t mean anything to you, maybe you didn’t come of age in the 1980s, a time of eyeliner matched to your watch strap** and cheerful and occasionally political*** synth pop. Lou and I were fans of a band called The Human League:

(They are still going strong. I saw them in concert about ten years ago and they were bloody brilliant.)

You will most likely know The Human League from one of their biggest hits, ‘Don’t You Want Me Baby’. Their frontman. Philip Oakey, also featured on a song called ‘Together in Electric Dreams’, which includes the lyric ‘We’ll always be together/however far it seems/We’ll always be together/together in electric dreams’.**** When Lou gave me the t-shirt, and we knew her death was likely days away, she said, ‘I want you to always be able to think of us in a cosmic disco somewhere’.

Why am I telling you this today? Well, because yesterday I was bimbling about in our local town, whose shopping arcade has a sound system that plays 80s pop and soft rock the entire time. (No, I don’t know why either.) Anyway, just as I came out of a shop, I heard the opening chords of ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ and it froze me to the spot. Not sadness, exactly, just the great whumph that hits you when you realise once again, and also somehow for the first time, that you will never, ever see your beloved person again. I sat down on a bench and I listened. It was late in the afternoon, and chucking it down with rain, so there weren’t many people around; just me and the music and the remembering and the missing.

As the song ended, a woman came up to me and asked if I was all right. I said that I was. I think it was true.

Lou said she didn’t need any presents for her last Christmas and although I wanted to respect that, sometimes friendship means overruling someone. So I bought this (from here.)

and I filled it with nice things. Lou didn’t get to use any of them, but when she unwrapped the canvas pouch and read it she laughed.

I think it was the last time I saw her laugh.

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This week’s permission:

You have permission to express your love to your people. You cannot do it too often.

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As promised! Here is the shawl, the right way out.*****

Details: the pattern is the Hedgerow Shawl MKAL and the yarn is from Along Avec Anna. It’s a joy to knit with. I used just less than 50g of colour A, exactly 50g of colour B, and had quite a bit of my 50g ball of colour C left over, so could have made it from 150g.

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In other news, the sticks I bought and planted last year are coming alive. Hooray! I feel excessively delighted with myself. ******

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I’ve got a manuscript assessment slot coming up - does it have your name on it? If your ms is done, but you’re not quite sure it’s there, it might be. Take a look here and message me, and we’ll talk. (I’d also like to take one mentee in May - is that you?)

That’s it for this week, friends. Next week: merch news, bookish excitement.

Be well, stay well. Thank you for being here.

Stephanie x

*I love a dragon. I’ll tell you the story sometime.
**I promise this is true.

***See ‘Enola Gay’ by Tears For Fears, a song about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb.

****It was the soundtrack to a film called Electric Dreams which, if memory serves, is about what happens when a computer becomes sentient and falls in love with a cellist. Really not making this up.

*****Photography (and generally bringing out the best in me) Beloved Mr Butland

******Is this how Harris feels when working on Project Massive Hole? I fear it is.