The Soundtrack of Our Lives
A Double Album in Prose
by Annie Christie
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Swearwords: None.
Description: For anyone who has ever got lost in music!
Disc Two
Side Two
A Little Ditty
Oh, yeah, life goes on,
Long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
Side Two
A Little Ditty
Oh, yeah, life goes on,
Long after the thrill of living is gone (John Cougar)
Track Ten
We've got stars directing our fate,
and we're praying it's not too late (Robbie Williams)
~ 2000 ~
We've got stars directing our fate,
and we're praying it's not too late (Robbie Williams)
~ 2000 ~
I moved back up to Edinburgh. My mum’s cancer was terminal and my dad wasn’t coping well. I told myself it was time for a career break anyway. But I hadn’t figured on the reality of looking after two parents, singlehanded. It was relentless. I became virtually housebound. This sounds like I’m complaining and really I’m not. There is no point in complaining anyway. As an only child I felt a responsibility. It was just life. It does go on… long after the joy of living is gone. I knew that. I accepted it.
But before I left London there was one person I had to see.
No, not Mark. I’d made my break with him in 1998 and I wasn’t going back. You will perhaps think it pitiful when I recall that in the near fifteen years I’d spent in London, I only really made one friend. And I only saw him on Sunday mornings. I didn’t even know his second name. I just knew him as Prawn Patrick.
It was Mark who introduced us, actually. One Sunday, not long after I’d made the move from Surbiton to Rotherhithe, into the new Thames side developments that were supposed to regenerate but actually ripped the heart out of large parts of the East of London, we went in search of a Sunday morning treat. Prawns.
All I know about Prawn Patrick really is that he was a guy who worked a market stall type thing on a Sunday morning around Bermondsey. An Eastender through and through, ‘one of the old-school’ as Mark called him, he sold prawns by the pint to anyone who wanted them.
I’ve always had something of a weakness for prawns. But I’d never thought to buy and eat them by the pint. Patrick also sold winkles, cockles and the like, but they never did it for me. Prawns, now that’s a different matter. I don’t know what it is about them, but I can never get enough. Even as I’m cramming one into my mouth, I crave the next. There is never an end to the juiciness of a prawn – in my opinion. There are worse addictions, don’t I know it.
So Prawn Patrick became a regular part of my life for the best part of ten years. And while my other interactions in London might give the lie to the following statement, in the case of Patrick, I couldn’t meet up with him nearly every week without building some kind of relationship that might tend towards a friendship.
Patrick outlasted Mark, after all. From the early days when Mark and I would buy up two or three pints of prawns and head back for a lazy day indoors, to the later times when I went alone, necked back my prawns while in the company of Patrick, but always ended up with ‘one for the road’; like the Walrus and the Carpenter, we spoke of many things.
The other thing about Patrick was that he played music. He said it kept him warm in the winter and cool in the summer, listening to tunes. He had some pretty off the wall tastes, but pretty good ones too. He was sixty if he was a day (and I’m talking in the late eighties here). He told me he was one of the original mods. After he saw the light from being a teddy boy. He had the gift of the gab all right Patrick and a heart of gold.
It was Patrick who confirmed what of course I knew really, that I was ‘too good for him’, when I told him Mark and I had broken up. And it was Patrick who got the full story of my having to go home because of my mum’s cancer.
Over the weeks and months and years, Patrick and I shared so much more than prawns. I introduced him to modern versions of his old favourite cappuccino. He introduced me to the music that influenced the likes of Paul Weller and the Two Tone boys. If I think back, he’s the only person I was ever really truly open with. I told him everything. I mean it. Everything. I even told him about how I felt about Billy. And he didn’t laugh, he didn’t judge. Patrick was better than that. He cared about me. Really cared.
But I had to leave London. He knew that too. He wished me well. And he told me his own secret passion. For pomegranate juice. He felt about pomegranate juice like I did about prawns. And he felt about June, his wife of forty years, like I felt about Billy. He almost convinced me that there could be a happy ending. But he didn’t soft-soap me. He was a realist too. He didn’t subscribe to the stars dictating our fate guff of Robbie Williams; his was an older philosophy born in an earlier time and his favourite singer was J.J.Walker. At a time when I was banishing music from my home because it had such a bad influence on me emotionally, he introduced me to the Allstars classics Take Me Girl I’m ready, How Sweet it Is to be loved by you and What does it Take. In those years when I was turning my back on the music of my own past, he helped me through, with regular doses of Motown.
Patrick and I even had our song. It was the Lovin’ Spoonful. We used to sing it to each other, over the prawn stall. You didn’t have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway, if you had just looked once or twice, and gone along your quiet way.
He was great, Prawn Patrick. He was a moment that turned into a friendship that hung around my memory for a long, long time. Stupid as it might sound, I felt, perhaps still feel, that he was the only person who ever really believed in me. And that meant a lot.
So in 2000, I left London without feeling I was giving up anything of value. Except Patrick and the Sunday morning prawns. Years later, when I was on a visit to London, I went back to find him but his stall was long gone and so was he. It was the end of an era. It happens. He went upon his quiet way. I never forgot that he didn’t have to be so nice, but he was. I can’t eat prawns now without thinking of Patrick.
~ 2013 ~
‘You really don’t get it.’
Laura was on the phone again.
I was questioning the sense of raking up the past, specifically given the events of the 2003 reunion.
‘What’s to get?’
‘It’s our lives, Jane. It’s who we are.’
Well of course I knew that, but perhaps by 2013 I really wasn’t that keen to keep raking over the who we were’s and comparing them to the who we are’s.
‘I don’t know. There’s no real happy ending for any of us, is there?’
‘Get over it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be better this time. I know it will.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, it’ll be just like old times. For the last time.’
I swear it was only because she said ‘the last time’ that I agreed to go.
I wanted to see Billy. As much as I didn’t relish the idea of seeing what ravages time had played on him as he hit the wrong side of fifty, I could never resist that last pint of prawns. I wanted to see him one more time and I knew Patrick would have told me to go for it. He always said ‘enough is never enough if it’s what you love.’ He was so right.
~ 2001 ~
I was back in Edinburgh, but I was under effective house arrest. I had no time to get lost in music, I was lost in my family stuff. Not so much Running in the Family with Level 42 as Writing to Reach you with Travis.
In 2001 we had all forgotten about Space Odyssey or even Space Oddity. What should have been a milestone for me; it was the year I turned 40; went by in a blur. And I don’t mean the pop group, who had more or less grown up and gone their separate ways. As, I thought, we had.
I missed a lot of important things in those years. More important than the charts. I missed Rachel’s 40th birthday and Billy’s 40th birthday and Laura’s 40th birthday and didn’t even pay much attention to my own 40th birthday, though my parents tried to make a special day of it.
For what it’s worth my 40th birthday song was Whole Again by Atomic Kitten. Looking back on when we first met, I cannot escape and I cannot forget. But life certainly wasn’t Pure and Simple for us any more than it turned out to be for Hearsay, another manufactured group of the time.
I assumed the others all had 40th birthday parties, but I had no idea what was really going on. No one invited me and Laura never filled me in on it. As always, I was the last to know. I shouldn’t blame her. She phoned for a while when I first moved back home, but I never really paid attention to her, and I certainly never took her up on the offers to go out on a girls’ night out. So, pretty soon, she gave up on me. I gave up on me. I had nothing left after my attention and emotion were focussed on my mum – who died in 2002 – leaving my dad completely bereft and in need of everything I had and more.
Though I barely noted my own 40th birthday, I did reach out of my bubble enough to note that on Billy’s 40th birthday the number one was S Club 7, Don’t Stop Moving. That must really have stung. Or perhaps he didn’t care any more? There is certainly nothing even I could derive from those lyrics and I remember briefly thinking that it was probably just as well that Rachel wouldn’t be keeping up the tradition of sending Billy birthday number one singles. Though a tiny part of me couldn’t help but imagine Steph being crass enough to buy him the single! What did I know?
I had no idea what was going on with Billy or Rachel in 2001. I had stepped right out of the groove. Little did I know the significance to them of S Club 7… not Don’t stop moving, but their earlier 2000 Christmas hit Never Had a Dream Come True.
~ 2000 ~
Christmas 2000 was a tough one for my family. We thought it would be my mum’s last but in actuality we had to re-run that experience all over again at Christmas 2001 to the strains of Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman doing a Frank and Nancy Sinatra with Something Stupid. In the house that could not be allowed to be silent in case we said the words that Elvis Costello would remind us scared us so, we had Top of the Pops Christmas edition on while eating our Christmas Dinner.
We’d endured the deadly Don’t Stop Moving, and Westlife’s version of Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl – Billy and Rachel were firmly in my mind by that point. There was a double helping of Atomic Kitten with Eternal Flame (yet another cover) and Whole Again. I think we got Hearsay’s Pure and Simple which was predictable pop but we were incandescent as a family at that travesty which was Robbie and Nicole’s sarcastic yet saccharin version of Frank and Nancy’s classic. It was wrong on so many levels. My mum, in a rare gesture of spirit, used the remote control and turned it off and we sat in silence until the Queen came on. Yes, Perry, Memories are made of this.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t total silence. My dad, after quite a pause said to my mum, ‘Well, Jean, that wasn’t something stupid was it?’
We tried to laugh. I kind of wished someone had said those three stupid little words, but our family wasn’t like that. We didn’t go big on shows of emotion. Not until it was too late. Maybe if there had been more real words spoken I’d have put less store on the lyrics sung over the years?
I remember the silence was difficult that afternoon, but at least we were spared Geri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men, Kylie Minogue Can’t get you out of my head and Shaggy, it wasn’t me.
My parents would never have got to grips with Shaggy. I quite liked it but I’d hate to have it as part of my memory bank for my mum’s last Christmas. It always made me think of Grant and Mark, to be honest, and those were memories I was quite keen to forget.
~ 2001-2003 ~
It was a weird time that couple of years. It wasn’t that I was particularly close to my parents. As an only child my primary emotion was always a sense of responsibility, of duty. It was more that I was empty. I became empty as a consequence of having to deal with their pain. I don’t know which was worse, my mum’s physical pain – which meant we had to keep the TV or radio on all the time to divert her – or my dad’s emotional pain.
We were probably the only people in the world for whom 7/11 was a background event. It was the day they told my mum she had three months to live. She lasted seven. And every day was torture for all of us, each locked in their own private hell.
I grew to hate the radio and TV and its inane chat which seemed trite to me and surely must have seemed even more pointless to her given that she knew her days were numbered. What did any of it matter? What could any of it matter? World events, chart hits, the latest celebrity gossip. None of it meant anything in the face of cancer. And then, after she died, there was silence. Silence in the face of my dad’s overwhelming grief.
I’d never thought of them as being ‘in love’, I suppose. At first I didn’t even clock it as the root of the pain. I just assumed that, having been together through thick and thin for some sixty years, he was missing something that was no more than a habit. Until he broke down and told me how much he’d loved her.
It was long after the funeral. It was the day I decided to go to the 2003 reunion.
That was such a strange day.
‘Jane,’ he said, ‘I want to hear our song.’
‘What song?’ I asked.
‘Your mum and my’s song,’ he said.
I had no idea they even had a song. I hated having to say ‘What is it, dad?’ because clearly this was the most important song in the world to him and I should have known it. It was Adam Faith’s 1960 hit Someone else’s Baby. I’d never have guessed. Still waters run deep. And that day, my dad’s well opened up. He sent me into the spare room and I unearthed his old Dansette and record collection. He found a box of old records, which one day they must have packed away, much as I did – for different reasons but perhaps not so different – perhaps a recognition that life goes on.
We dusted off his Adam Faith album and while it played he told me all about how they met, how she’d been going out with someone else, a really popular boy, taller, more handsome, and how he thought he’d never have a chance. But he was wrong. He told me how he’d taken her out on a picnic, how they’d kissed and then… with tears streaming down his face he told me ‘Don’t ever give up on love, Janie.’ He’d never called me that before. No one ever called me Janie. Except Billy. But that day, my dad did.
I wasn’t as brave as my dad right then, I couldn’t face a trip down my own memory lane. I didn’t delve back into my own record collection. Instead I turned on the radio. Busted. These are the words that greeted me: You're so fit, and you know it, And I only dream of you, And my life's such a bitch, But you can change it.
Coming so soon after my dad spilled his heart out to me, even though I had more affinity with the chorus The whole world was watching and laughing On the day that I crashed and burned At your feet.
I thought it was worth one more try. Well, at least from the sidelines. One last time to see if Patrick and my dad were right and true love could triumph in the end. And you know what. They were right.
It wasn’t an hour later that Laura phoned. And I agreed to go to the reunion.
But before I left London there was one person I had to see.
No, not Mark. I’d made my break with him in 1998 and I wasn’t going back. You will perhaps think it pitiful when I recall that in the near fifteen years I’d spent in London, I only really made one friend. And I only saw him on Sunday mornings. I didn’t even know his second name. I just knew him as Prawn Patrick.
It was Mark who introduced us, actually. One Sunday, not long after I’d made the move from Surbiton to Rotherhithe, into the new Thames side developments that were supposed to regenerate but actually ripped the heart out of large parts of the East of London, we went in search of a Sunday morning treat. Prawns.
All I know about Prawn Patrick really is that he was a guy who worked a market stall type thing on a Sunday morning around Bermondsey. An Eastender through and through, ‘one of the old-school’ as Mark called him, he sold prawns by the pint to anyone who wanted them.
I’ve always had something of a weakness for prawns. But I’d never thought to buy and eat them by the pint. Patrick also sold winkles, cockles and the like, but they never did it for me. Prawns, now that’s a different matter. I don’t know what it is about them, but I can never get enough. Even as I’m cramming one into my mouth, I crave the next. There is never an end to the juiciness of a prawn – in my opinion. There are worse addictions, don’t I know it.
So Prawn Patrick became a regular part of my life for the best part of ten years. And while my other interactions in London might give the lie to the following statement, in the case of Patrick, I couldn’t meet up with him nearly every week without building some kind of relationship that might tend towards a friendship.
Patrick outlasted Mark, after all. From the early days when Mark and I would buy up two or three pints of prawns and head back for a lazy day indoors, to the later times when I went alone, necked back my prawns while in the company of Patrick, but always ended up with ‘one for the road’; like the Walrus and the Carpenter, we spoke of many things.
The other thing about Patrick was that he played music. He said it kept him warm in the winter and cool in the summer, listening to tunes. He had some pretty off the wall tastes, but pretty good ones too. He was sixty if he was a day (and I’m talking in the late eighties here). He told me he was one of the original mods. After he saw the light from being a teddy boy. He had the gift of the gab all right Patrick and a heart of gold.
It was Patrick who confirmed what of course I knew really, that I was ‘too good for him’, when I told him Mark and I had broken up. And it was Patrick who got the full story of my having to go home because of my mum’s cancer.
Over the weeks and months and years, Patrick and I shared so much more than prawns. I introduced him to modern versions of his old favourite cappuccino. He introduced me to the music that influenced the likes of Paul Weller and the Two Tone boys. If I think back, he’s the only person I was ever really truly open with. I told him everything. I mean it. Everything. I even told him about how I felt about Billy. And he didn’t laugh, he didn’t judge. Patrick was better than that. He cared about me. Really cared.
But I had to leave London. He knew that too. He wished me well. And he told me his own secret passion. For pomegranate juice. He felt about pomegranate juice like I did about prawns. And he felt about June, his wife of forty years, like I felt about Billy. He almost convinced me that there could be a happy ending. But he didn’t soft-soap me. He was a realist too. He didn’t subscribe to the stars dictating our fate guff of Robbie Williams; his was an older philosophy born in an earlier time and his favourite singer was J.J.Walker. At a time when I was banishing music from my home because it had such a bad influence on me emotionally, he introduced me to the Allstars classics Take Me Girl I’m ready, How Sweet it Is to be loved by you and What does it Take. In those years when I was turning my back on the music of my own past, he helped me through, with regular doses of Motown.
Patrick and I even had our song. It was the Lovin’ Spoonful. We used to sing it to each other, over the prawn stall. You didn’t have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway, if you had just looked once or twice, and gone along your quiet way.
He was great, Prawn Patrick. He was a moment that turned into a friendship that hung around my memory for a long, long time. Stupid as it might sound, I felt, perhaps still feel, that he was the only person who ever really believed in me. And that meant a lot.
So in 2000, I left London without feeling I was giving up anything of value. Except Patrick and the Sunday morning prawns. Years later, when I was on a visit to London, I went back to find him but his stall was long gone and so was he. It was the end of an era. It happens. He went upon his quiet way. I never forgot that he didn’t have to be so nice, but he was. I can’t eat prawns now without thinking of Patrick.
~ 2013 ~
‘You really don’t get it.’
Laura was on the phone again.
I was questioning the sense of raking up the past, specifically given the events of the 2003 reunion.
‘What’s to get?’
‘It’s our lives, Jane. It’s who we are.’
Well of course I knew that, but perhaps by 2013 I really wasn’t that keen to keep raking over the who we were’s and comparing them to the who we are’s.
‘I don’t know. There’s no real happy ending for any of us, is there?’
‘Get over it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be better this time. I know it will.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, it’ll be just like old times. For the last time.’
I swear it was only because she said ‘the last time’ that I agreed to go.
I wanted to see Billy. As much as I didn’t relish the idea of seeing what ravages time had played on him as he hit the wrong side of fifty, I could never resist that last pint of prawns. I wanted to see him one more time and I knew Patrick would have told me to go for it. He always said ‘enough is never enough if it’s what you love.’ He was so right.
~ 2001 ~
I was back in Edinburgh, but I was under effective house arrest. I had no time to get lost in music, I was lost in my family stuff. Not so much Running in the Family with Level 42 as Writing to Reach you with Travis.
In 2001 we had all forgotten about Space Odyssey or even Space Oddity. What should have been a milestone for me; it was the year I turned 40; went by in a blur. And I don’t mean the pop group, who had more or less grown up and gone their separate ways. As, I thought, we had.
I missed a lot of important things in those years. More important than the charts. I missed Rachel’s 40th birthday and Billy’s 40th birthday and Laura’s 40th birthday and didn’t even pay much attention to my own 40th birthday, though my parents tried to make a special day of it.
For what it’s worth my 40th birthday song was Whole Again by Atomic Kitten. Looking back on when we first met, I cannot escape and I cannot forget. But life certainly wasn’t Pure and Simple for us any more than it turned out to be for Hearsay, another manufactured group of the time.
I assumed the others all had 40th birthday parties, but I had no idea what was really going on. No one invited me and Laura never filled me in on it. As always, I was the last to know. I shouldn’t blame her. She phoned for a while when I first moved back home, but I never really paid attention to her, and I certainly never took her up on the offers to go out on a girls’ night out. So, pretty soon, she gave up on me. I gave up on me. I had nothing left after my attention and emotion were focussed on my mum – who died in 2002 – leaving my dad completely bereft and in need of everything I had and more.
Though I barely noted my own 40th birthday, I did reach out of my bubble enough to note that on Billy’s 40th birthday the number one was S Club 7, Don’t Stop Moving. That must really have stung. Or perhaps he didn’t care any more? There is certainly nothing even I could derive from those lyrics and I remember briefly thinking that it was probably just as well that Rachel wouldn’t be keeping up the tradition of sending Billy birthday number one singles. Though a tiny part of me couldn’t help but imagine Steph being crass enough to buy him the single! What did I know?
I had no idea what was going on with Billy or Rachel in 2001. I had stepped right out of the groove. Little did I know the significance to them of S Club 7… not Don’t stop moving, but their earlier 2000 Christmas hit Never Had a Dream Come True.
~ 2000 ~
Christmas 2000 was a tough one for my family. We thought it would be my mum’s last but in actuality we had to re-run that experience all over again at Christmas 2001 to the strains of Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman doing a Frank and Nancy Sinatra with Something Stupid. In the house that could not be allowed to be silent in case we said the words that Elvis Costello would remind us scared us so, we had Top of the Pops Christmas edition on while eating our Christmas Dinner.
We’d endured the deadly Don’t Stop Moving, and Westlife’s version of Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl – Billy and Rachel were firmly in my mind by that point. There was a double helping of Atomic Kitten with Eternal Flame (yet another cover) and Whole Again. I think we got Hearsay’s Pure and Simple which was predictable pop but we were incandescent as a family at that travesty which was Robbie and Nicole’s sarcastic yet saccharin version of Frank and Nancy’s classic. It was wrong on so many levels. My mum, in a rare gesture of spirit, used the remote control and turned it off and we sat in silence until the Queen came on. Yes, Perry, Memories are made of this.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t total silence. My dad, after quite a pause said to my mum, ‘Well, Jean, that wasn’t something stupid was it?’
We tried to laugh. I kind of wished someone had said those three stupid little words, but our family wasn’t like that. We didn’t go big on shows of emotion. Not until it was too late. Maybe if there had been more real words spoken I’d have put less store on the lyrics sung over the years?
I remember the silence was difficult that afternoon, but at least we were spared Geri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men, Kylie Minogue Can’t get you out of my head and Shaggy, it wasn’t me.
My parents would never have got to grips with Shaggy. I quite liked it but I’d hate to have it as part of my memory bank for my mum’s last Christmas. It always made me think of Grant and Mark, to be honest, and those were memories I was quite keen to forget.
~ 2001-2003 ~
It was a weird time that couple of years. It wasn’t that I was particularly close to my parents. As an only child my primary emotion was always a sense of responsibility, of duty. It was more that I was empty. I became empty as a consequence of having to deal with their pain. I don’t know which was worse, my mum’s physical pain – which meant we had to keep the TV or radio on all the time to divert her – or my dad’s emotional pain.
We were probably the only people in the world for whom 7/11 was a background event. It was the day they told my mum she had three months to live. She lasted seven. And every day was torture for all of us, each locked in their own private hell.
I grew to hate the radio and TV and its inane chat which seemed trite to me and surely must have seemed even more pointless to her given that she knew her days were numbered. What did any of it matter? What could any of it matter? World events, chart hits, the latest celebrity gossip. None of it meant anything in the face of cancer. And then, after she died, there was silence. Silence in the face of my dad’s overwhelming grief.
I’d never thought of them as being ‘in love’, I suppose. At first I didn’t even clock it as the root of the pain. I just assumed that, having been together through thick and thin for some sixty years, he was missing something that was no more than a habit. Until he broke down and told me how much he’d loved her.
It was long after the funeral. It was the day I decided to go to the 2003 reunion.
That was such a strange day.
‘Jane,’ he said, ‘I want to hear our song.’
‘What song?’ I asked.
‘Your mum and my’s song,’ he said.
I had no idea they even had a song. I hated having to say ‘What is it, dad?’ because clearly this was the most important song in the world to him and I should have known it. It was Adam Faith’s 1960 hit Someone else’s Baby. I’d never have guessed. Still waters run deep. And that day, my dad’s well opened up. He sent me into the spare room and I unearthed his old Dansette and record collection. He found a box of old records, which one day they must have packed away, much as I did – for different reasons but perhaps not so different – perhaps a recognition that life goes on.
We dusted off his Adam Faith album and while it played he told me all about how they met, how she’d been going out with someone else, a really popular boy, taller, more handsome, and how he thought he’d never have a chance. But he was wrong. He told me how he’d taken her out on a picnic, how they’d kissed and then… with tears streaming down his face he told me ‘Don’t ever give up on love, Janie.’ He’d never called me that before. No one ever called me Janie. Except Billy. But that day, my dad did.
I wasn’t as brave as my dad right then, I couldn’t face a trip down my own memory lane. I didn’t delve back into my own record collection. Instead I turned on the radio. Busted. These are the words that greeted me: You're so fit, and you know it, And I only dream of you, And my life's such a bitch, But you can change it.
Coming so soon after my dad spilled his heart out to me, even though I had more affinity with the chorus The whole world was watching and laughing On the day that I crashed and burned At your feet.
I thought it was worth one more try. Well, at least from the sidelines. One last time to see if Patrick and my dad were right and true love could triumph in the end. And you know what. They were right.
It wasn’t an hour later that Laura phoned. And I agreed to go to the reunion.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
The Soundtrack of Our Lives is Annie's fourth McSerial written for McStorytellers.