From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
In the snow globe of memory, where flakes of time drift down on the golden forms of you and your one true love, there dwells this song. “Things We Said Today” will be clearly recalled by the two of us, still together in the far distant future; that’s the premise. It’s my favourite song on the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night album, and one of my favourite McCartney compositions. And Paul was true to his dream: he and Linda stayed together for over 30 years - it was only her death that parted them.

The way this tune shifts from minor to major, the exultant middle section, the daring chromatic descent over “Love is here to stay and that’s…” all got to me long before I learned any of that musical terminology. It’s haunting and exciting, like true love itself. Even Bob Dylan has recorded it.

I first heard it 60 years ago, man and boy, and it always reminds me of travelling on a bus from Lydney in Gloucestershire to Cardiff in South Wales in search of the rare single-decker trolleybuses there, in the summer of 1964. It turned out that these beauties were already stored away in a depot awaiting demolition then, but I did glimpse a few of them briefly through the windows of the double-decker bus that I was riding on. Hundreds of years later, in 2023, I finally managed to track down a surviving Cardiff single-decker.