Epilogue

So what’s the matter with you?

Sing me something new

Don’t you know, the cold and wind and rain don’t know

They only seem to come and go away

Stand by me

Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be

Stand by me

Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be

Stand by me

Nobody knows the way it’s gonna be

Stand By me – Oasis, 1997

 

Introduction

Cursor flashing. Empty page. I stare at the screen as if I were staring into the abyss. It’s been this way for some time. For far too long.

I know I need to write my story. I want to write my story.

However, I have struggled to begin it for same the reason I struggle to blog. Or struggle to post regularly on social media. I consider myself a very private person. So a public outpouring goes completely against my character. I have to change this. Or this won’t get written.

Why does my story need to be told?

It needs to be told so that anyone, or a partner or friend of anyone going through some of the life experiences I have gone through, can learn or take something from my journey.

It needs to be told so my family and friends have the full picture. They’ve supported me throughout, and I hope this fills in some gaps.

Each time I have sat down to write I have found myself procrastinating, getting upset and stepping back from the computer.

To bring myself back to the job at hand, I’d play a song.

Music has always meant so much to me.

From the age of seven or eight, safely hidden underneath my Dad’s antique oak desk in the hallway, attuned to the Eurovision winning pop whimsy of The Brotherhood of Man drifting through the draughty hallway from the radio in the kitchen, through to a lifetime of musical discovery, music has always been my accompaniment, my companion, my therapy.

Every significant moment in my life, a song has always accompanied it. A lyric has articulated it. A singer has encapsulated it.

And so to elucidate my scrambled, sometimes obfuscated memories of joy and pain (and sunshine and rain), I devised a playlist of key life events in my life.

I immersed myself in each song, and as the memories came flooding back, I have tried to relay them here on paper.

I’m hoping this will help me write my story.

These words are my own*.

Clive France, 2021

*Although I am humming the 2004 song from Natasha Bedingfield as I write that.