The rattle of the letterbox followed by the slap of something falling from the door to the floor turn my attention from the computer screen. The youngest materialises by the small pile of post, and examines it with disgust.
“Anything for me?” I say, hopefully. I love post.
“All for you,” comes the reply. “And all boring.”
“This isn’t boring, it’s…” I pause while I open a padded bag.
“It’s…” I pause further while I read a piece of paper.
“Well, I suppose it’s…” I read the paper again.
“Apparently, it’s Slovak Jazz.”
The first review I ever wrote was when I was a teenager in the 1990s. My English teacher, perhaps sensing some (well hidden) potential for future journalistic skill, arranged for me to review a play at the local arts centre. It was a stage production of DH Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’ - the review duly made the arts page of the town’s newspaper under the heading: “Sons and Lovers is bleak and depressing.”
DH Lawrence has never returned my calls since.
Following my inauspicious beginnings I have gone on to write many more reviews, their name is legion for they are many. Now I find myself at the mercy of the apparently random choices of editors who seem to answer the question: “who on earth is going to review this?” With my name.
Cue Slovak Jazz.
It’s not that I don’t imagine anyone in Slovakia listens to or plays Jazz, on the contrary, I imagine it to be a highly cultured society with a vibrant music scene. It’s just that I don’t really know why it’s been sent to me.
The day goes on, the youngest’s boyfriend comes round, I finish my ‘so called work’ around five and adjourn to the living room where I listen to the Slovak Jazz on my stereo. “Surprisingly good,” I think, mentally writing a better headline than the one DH Lawrence was awarded.
Languid Slovak Jazz washes over me, I pick up a book… “What a way to live,” I think, happily.
At the dinner table conversation flows and then slows. When that happens I sometimes like to inject something interesting or even exciting to stimulate discussion.
“I’ve been listening to that Slovak Jazz,” I say. “It’s surprisingly good.”
The youngest’s boyfriend looks into the middle distance. “That is a sentence I would only ever hear at this table,” he says.
The youngest nods and says: “The trouble is, he thinks this is normal.”
‘Saturday columns’ are short, (relatively) funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life. There’s not supposed to be any point to them. But they might make you smile. Bear with me if I don’t manage every Saturday, I’m working on it.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.