Sunday Morning Coming Down

My apologies for the absence of any posts last weekend: I took a couple of days annual leave and was over at my folks house, helping my Dad celebrate his 84th birthday (which was on Tuesday) and simply didn’t have time to write everything I’d hoped to before I left home.

I’ve mentioned many times on these pages before that my love of Country music comes from Dad, one of many things I’m eternally grateful for, so I figured today I’d post one of the many songs he introduced me to. By which I mean, this song has featured here before, but it’s so good it deserves having the dust blown off of it occasionally.

When me and my brothers were kids, Dad worked away a lot, often overseas, something I know troubled him later on: he once asked me: did we resent the fact that he was away so much? (We’re not good at talking about feelings and stuff in our family, so we’d both had a few drinks when this subject was raised). Of course not, I replied. Sure, it would have been great if he’d been around more, but that was the norm for us. As we’ve got older, we know and appreciate he was doing what he had to do: providing what was a a very comfortable life for his family. Angela’s Ashes it wasn’t.

Tonight’s song reminds me of when he was around. Saturday afternoons would be spent driving to visit family: my grandparents on my mum’s side (if Gramps wasn’t in the pub, then he’d be sat in front of the wrestling on the TV, and was not to be disturbed!), then my grandmother on my Dad’s side, and then over to visit my great-grandmother, also on my Dad’s side, where we would be greeted with a hug and a kiss followed by a Crunchie bar. We’d endured the former, knowing the latter would be the pay-off.

Then the drive home, and we’d invariably stop off at The Chequered Skipper, a beautiful pub in Ashton, now sadly closed, as so many are. Look at how gorgeous it was:

What you can’t see from that is the vast expanse of greenery that lays in front of it, a beer garden like no other, where parents could sit at a bench and watch their kids could kick a ball around, or, as my parents did, wonder where I had gotten myself to (I had a habit of wandering off) only to find I’d gone to the furthest away trees where I was pretending to be Dr Who battling the Zygons, out of sight from prying adult eyes.

Somewhere in the family archive there are photos of my brother and I sitting at one of the benches, posing with an old-school pint poised to our lips. Sadly, I don’t have those pictures here, so here’s one of me looking impossibly cute and my brother looking impossibly disgruntled (you’ll work out which is which, I think…):

But I digress. As the night went on and darkness descended, my brother and I would be sent off to the car with a bottle of lemonade and a packet of peanuts each, whilst Mum & Dad retired to the warmth of the bar. We’d sit, slurp, munch, invariably argue and fight, whilst listening to whatever tape Dad had prepared for the day’s excursion.

The soundtrack to the whole day would usually be a couple of Kris Kristofferson albums, occasionally something by Johnny Cash, and even more infrequently an album by today’s artist, inevitably including today’s song. Although both my brother and I refused to acknowledge it for years, eventually we succumbed and admitted to loving all of those songs.

Especially this one, a classic Country tale of the singer leaving their partner cos they done them wrong. As an aside, you’ll note the amount of time both artist and label spent thinking of a title for the album it sits on. Peter Gabriel, eat your heart out:

Charley Pride – Is Anybody Goin’ To San Antone

If you do nothing else this weekend, then listen to that, it’s so so good.

More soon.