Swingers

My Dear Fellows & Dear Princess,

It has been a very quiet day today. We've watched a lot of documentaries. We watched a very funny one about Manolo Blahnik who (it turns out) is an extremely eccentric man. 

We're just now watching one about Eric Clapton. Cazza and me both love 1960's music so even though we're not huge fans of Cream and The Yardbirds, it's still interesting stuff. We love tales of drug-fueled debauchery and heartache.

Living in Yorkshire, my parents did not swing. I do not think the Cultural Revolution reached up much beyond Wolverhampton. Their favourite music was Cliff and The Everly Brothers and early Beatles only. Anything after that was WEIRD.

The Rolling Stones, The Who and Jimi Hendrix were all out. My sister and me had to discover them on our own, dissuaded by our parents who dismissed anyone who set their own guitar on fire as being hopelessly impractical.

Not so Cazza's parents. They were in the thick of it. Shetland Dad had departed the Shetlands right bang on time for Swinging London.

"Och, ye dinnae want to go tae London," said one of his aunties. "It's full o' nekkid wimmen."

"I was on the very next train," Shetland Dad told me. 

He and J-Bar set up a flat there, apparently just around the corner from Cliff Richard, who they saw often going to get his morning paper. Shetland Dad also reckons he saw Cliff and the Shadows driving around and around the Eros statue in Picadilly Circus in a Cadillac on his way to work at 6am.

"Pissed as farts, they were," he told me. I'm not sure about this story. It sounds very un-Cliff-like to me. But he insists on its veracity to this day.

Shetland Dad worked as an accountant but, like a GROOVY accountant at the BBC. One of the perks of the job was to be in the audience for "Top of the Pops" where he saw Ringo, amongst others. He also saw Johnny Cash in such a state that he had to lay on the floor to rehearse.

THAT one sounds true.

Shetland Dad and J-Bar had a groovy 60's wedding in London. J-Bar in a mini wedding dress with white kinky boots. Shetland Dad very dapper with a big hippy moustache.

Of course, children soon follow marriage, and then suburbia. Cazza came along soon after and the new family moved to Hayward's Heath where she grew up. That was the end of the London lifestyle, and Cazza's parents became more like mine. The Counterculture Movement started and ended with out-of-control sideburns and loud ties.

All the same, Shetland Dad still listens to those records occasionally. And the Summer of Love lives on in my sister Tups's record collection and on my iPod. 

I might have to put on "Sergeant Pepper" later.

S.