Michelle Tant

Songs. Music. If anything is guaranteed to propel me back in time to a place or person... its music. Gabrielle, 'Dreams' was the anthem of my early teens when I had a mad crush on a boy in the year above me at school. He seemed so sophisticated and worldly, popular with everyone but did I detect a note of wistfullness about him that made him different from the other spotty obnoxious oiks his age? Of course I did, I was 13 years old, romantic to the core and sure that he was different. And naturally that we'd live happily ever after surviving on nothing but love and the fat of the land presumably. Bless her cotton socks, Gabrielle was there at the very birth of my idealism. Of course by the time I got into Pulp and the album 'freaks' I was a tortured little soul. I was 15 and had just grasped that Jarvis was being ironic when he said 'anorexic beauty, featherweight perfection' and I just knew that Jarvis would 'get me' if we were ever to meet...

Clare bit her pencil and she read back her list of New Years Resolutions. The usual suspects appeared, as expected, year after year, flowing unprovoked from her pencil tip and of course year after year, here she was, writing the same list again. She broke off to get herself a cuppa and stood staring out of the kitchen window. On this clear Saturday morning there was a slight mist and a glaze of frost on the grass, transforming the garden into a sparkly winter wonderland. Of course the garden was on the list again, ‘keep garden tidy’ was up there with ‘buy a composter’. Like it was every year, no surprise there then. Likewise, ‘eat less biscuits’, ‘keep on top of housework’, ‘stop biting nails’, ‘do more arty things with the kids’. The latter had actually made a valiant attempt at sticking power, the potato prints and homemade cards lasting well into March but even that had trailed off into leaving them to it with the posterpaints, albeit with a brief foray into toilet tube rockets in O...