Hippie Chick

Mostly one doesn’t know what people think  of one. It is always interesting, of course, to hear reports... like the other day when my friend Nicholas put his foot in it and it became clear that our mutual friend Alice Walpole- who is now in Baghdad, but who was the British ambassador to Mali last year- had described me in a certain way... He back pedalled but I insisted that he told me: how had she described me? And there it was: I am a ‘hippie chick’ according to Alice.

I don’t mind in the slightest. Hell, yeah,  I am a hippie chick! We had all the best music- there is simply no comparison.  I am sitting here at home tonight  cutting stencils for the work tomorrow , and I am listening to Jethro Tull- how lovely. Thick as a Brick, Aqualung- have not heard this for years- how evocative and how it transports me far away- well, not geographically as a matter of fact, only to the little village of Blewbury which featured in this journal for the wedding just a couple of weeks ago... that is where I spent some of my early years, indeed as a little hippie chick with my boyfriend, later husband Mike (picture above). And what else did we listen to? Ah, the Doors, Hendrix, Dylan, Led Zeppelin- and Traffic. The latter band used to spend time on the Downs and we ran into them now and then- Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi. They wrote a song called ‘Girl from the Villages’- we thought we knew the girl who inspired it.  And they recorded  the sweetest old English folksong called John Barleycorn which I just remembered and found- What joy to have Spotify!

Later, sure, I dived in and took what was new and good and came along- I became potty over the Pixies and must have been to all their mad London gigs in the beginning of the nineties- and there was Nirvana of course and Mudhoney- whose singer/songwriter I ran into in Bamako a couple of years ago...

And now? A lot of classical  - which I have also always loved.  And all the Malian music of course, which I used to listen to with Keita, who was a great music lover.