From Robyn on Patreon in 2023
My father Raymond passed away 31 years ago; my daughter Maisie followed him two months back. Life flows into us, through us, and out again - we are never at rest. We’re not statues or photographs, more like movies that show just once. We have only a lease on life, we can never own it. Yes, you knew this already, and so did I - but I have to remind myself every so often.

I wrote this song in the Isle of Wight, on a piece of lined paper that I found in my pocket one chilly April afternoon a few weeks after Raymond’s death. I’d been walking off a remorseless hangover, and found myself standing in a disused army barracks on the north-west coast, watching the sun creep down towards the mainland. Life seemed like an electrical impulse travelling through a series of lightbulbs, as in a fairground or outside a theatre. It kindles each bulb for a moment and moves on. My hangover had reached the tea-time horrors phase - a kind of negative existential epiphany that was effectively a panic attack. I became acutely aware of each moment as I passed through it, before it was discarded. Gosh, didn’t we have fun back then?

I walked back home and before going out to the pub again I took the lyrics I’d just written and put them on the pale green Formica kitchen table. The tune that came to me was a kind of hybrid of traditional British folk melodies, and seemed to fit just fine. I still have the cassette, but I no longer have that particular beatbox - which is a pity: it was a solid machine.

So it goes…