Idyllic

Today

I've always thought that the tale behind how Wagner's Siegfried Idyll was written is very romantic. Last night we listened to this rapturous little piece, courtesy of Lizzie, who'd given Paul a CD of Wagner orchestral items for his birthday.

"Doesn't this just release a flood of memories?" asked Paul. Indeed.

In My Day

When we were first married and living in the flat at Belmont in Brighton we somehow cobbled together a usable Hi-fi from various bits and pieces - an amplifier from me, a deck from who knows where and some speakers housed in old fashioned cabinets.

And didn't we love our music! We played whatever we could, on sometimes old and scratchy vinyl discs.

When Lizzie was a baby, she went through a phase, very common among newborns, of being rather fretful during early evening. Maybe it was a just a result of the change from her day at the childminder's to home and my tiredness and inability to cope that triggered this off. We quickly discovered that music soothed her troubled, if not exactly savage, breast, especially the Siegfried Idyll. It was no hardship to play this again and again as her crying tailed off and she settled into peaceful slumber.

It enabled us to get on with whatever chores were needed. I remember when we decorated the living room; we bought a creamy coloured paint named "County Cream" and its smell filled the room as strongly as did the sounds of Wagner, so that the two became somehow linked.

In some ways those days seem like another world, when we worried and scrabbled around to cope from day to day, with barely any idea of what we were doing. In others ways it's just the beginning of the thread that brings us to today.

And surely our story is every bit as romantic as Richard and Cosima Wagner's.