I think one of the legacies of Sab 5.0 (when I get back to thinking about it) will be my reintroduction to country music after something like 40 years.
The first 7-inch vinyl single that I ever bought as a young boy was Coward of the County by Kenny Rogers and I could still sing you all the lyrics now (the second one was ‘Don't you want me?’ by The Human League, I’ve always had a mixed-up music taste).
Nowadays, I wouldn't even dream of venturing close to country music or I wouldn't have done until the last few weeks because it seems to be associated with slavery and right wing thinking and all the bad things about the southern part of the United States of America.
But, I've realised, much to my dismay, that I was entirely wrong again and, there is so much to admire about it and so much to celebrate after being reintroduced to it by Malcolm Gladwell.
And so, I'll introduce you now to a podcast, one of the podcasts that I've been bingeing on from Malcolm Gladwell over the past four weeks.
I've gone through almost all of his Revisionist History podcasting series, but this is one of the early ones from Season three and is essentially about the loneliness and dysfunction of Elvis Presley but at the end of that podcast, Gladwell introduces you to a singer called Kaci Bolls and she agrees to perform acoustically one of her songs, Somebody's Somethin'.
And so, that was my introduction straight back to country music right there.
I referenced this in a meeting I had with Hayley last week and, of course, Hayley being the exceptional, talented line dancer with Laura from our practice knows all about Kaci Bolls and all about country music.
But the thing about country music as introduced by Gladwell in another of his podcasts is that it's specific, not generic.
It's personal, not abstract.
Let's compare it, for example, with Fake Plastic Trees by Radiohead it’s one of my favourite songs and has been for many years, but it’s really senseless nonsense, which has no meaning and if you go into the background of that, you'll understand that Thom Yorke, who wrote the song, had really no intention for its meaning.
That would never happen with country music.
Country music tells a story, a specific story about heartbreak or heartache or someone's work or problems with their family, and you can associate with it, or at least stories that you've heard of it and it provokes emotions because it's specific that very little else does.
As I listened to Somebody’s Somethin' and the lyrics and the description by Kaci Bolls, I was catapulted back to my grandmother, Elsie and everything I loved and admired about her.
I haven't thought about Elsie for the longest time (she died in 1995) and I feel a little bit ashamed about that, but I have thought about her over the past few weeks, and I think that's in part due to the reintroduction of country music and Somebody's Something by Malcolm Gladwell.
Isn't that the beauty of these things of being able to dance down alleyways that you wouldn't have had the time to do otherwise?
Elsie Campbell was born a Catholic and married a Protestant in the west of Scotland in the 1940’s
That would be utterly unthinkable if you were in that period now.
She lived one of the hardest lives, pawning bed sheets on a Monday to have enough to feed the family until payday on Friday.
She had married a labourer from the shipyards who had an unrepaired cleft palate and a very badly repaired cleft lip.
By all accounts, my grandfather, Hugh, was a bitter man and not an easy man to be married to.
Elsie raised three boys, one of whom died of a massive heart attack when he was 30 (one of the twins) and she struggled and struggled through her life to look after her grumpy husband and to raise her other two boys.
In the end, she lost Hugh in the late seventies and for the remaining years of her life was able to move to a tiny little one bedroom flat in the front of my hometown of Gourock and that is where I remember her best.
She was sharp and wonderful and magnificent, even though she had bowlegs due to rickets from when she was very little (which was corrected by two knee replacements).
I would go and visit her often as she sat in front of her coal fire, reading the local newspaper and watching the snooker or the tennis.
But every time I would go in and sit in the chair opposite, she was bright and engaged (I wonder if she might have been one of the cleverest people I've ever met, just in unfortunate circumstances).
The thing about Elsie was, though, that she was happy and content, and there was always a sense of huge contentment about her.
I think back to those times, and I wonder how she achieved such contentment with so little and then I'm reminded of the fact that contentment doesn't come from stuff.
All of this came from the reintroduction to country music and hearing Kaci Bolls sing a song about her mother, who was always somebody’s something and never anything for herself.
I think Elsie was only able to live a little bit of her own life closer to the end and when she got to the end, she told my Mum that she was ready to go.
I thought about this time and time again, about the discontentment of life that people have at the moment and the difficulty they have navigating things because it seems that they've been cast out by society and are not connected, even though they seem so connected by their digital devices.
Thinking deeply about that has helped me to help someone else who is having a difficult time at the moment for all of these reasons but in helping them, I've helped myself and isn't that the way it is.
You only know you’re fixed when you're able to help someone else.
Country is specific, and fake plastic trees is abstract.
Long live Kaci Bolls and long live country.
Blog Post Number - 3334