On Youtube this morning I stumbled over a voice and face from the past.
I was lucky enough to manage this singer when he was part of a band called Momajest, before he moved from the Banana Republic out to the US.
Eddy has great talent. So I thought I’d share it with you.
When I was 23 years old I had the strangest dream. I remember it vividly even now, nearly 20 years on.
I was living in a cottage on the Isle of Arran, off the West Coast of Scotland, where I had taken myself to write a book. The cottage was a whitewashed old place on a farm, with walls made of two layers of local stone, with rammed earth between to keep the wind out. In order to open the windows in the thick walls, I had to stretch deep into the window alcove, nearly bending double to do so. Being so thick, the walls also kept out the sound of the outside. It was a silent space.
Upstairs, the bedroom had a wooden ceiling following the angles of the roof. At night, the window looked out on to dark, brooding fields, and a sky filled with bright stars. The full moon would cycle round once a month, shining a milky light on to my bed, with me in it.
I slept deeply in that room. The soughing of the wind in the gables was the only sound, except sometimes I would hear the scratching of a mouse scurrying up over the roof.
I was a sensitive soul, and I had gone up there partially to write a novel, and partially to be cured of a broken heart. I was a romantic wanderer, I suppose.
One night, I was lying deep, deep in sleep in this silent place. As I slept, I dreamt that the spirit of a woman came to me. She was a strange creature, with a face as white as moonlight. She wore a winding sheet – or if not that – then a floating white cotton night dress. Her face was cold and she looked at me with a definite intent, though to do what I could not be sure. Her hair was blonde – not white blonde – but the colour of ripe straw. If I were to say that she was anything, then she seemed like a goddess of the wheat. And I don’t mean that she was a spirit from a bottle of fermented barley.
She floated closer, hovering over me, and I could feel her cold breath on me. I realised that she was going to float down and smother me. And it was then that I woke up with a short, sharp gasp, staring into the night.
And as I looked, she was still there in front of my eyes, lowering herself towards me.
I found that I could not move, and as she came closer, I tried so hard to cry out. But somehow I was held in a helpless trance, unable to move and unable to scream. I was shaking with fear. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears as her body and face pushed closer. I knew something terrible was going to happen.
And then, her body touched mine. And she continued to sink down until she completely disappeared inside of me.
As she did so, I felt a huge wave of resignation and relief wash through me. I had a feeling as if of an unwinding of a massive tense spring in my stomach, and I suddenly felt grateful and happy for her presence.
She has stayed with me, inside of me for years now. There are times when I feel that I have lost her. But she comes back when the time is right. When I am in contact with her, I feel at my most confident. I am able to organise my thoughts, and I am able to write coherently and from the heart.
I have no idea who she is, except that she is me.
Dreams are the strangest things. I do not know what that dream was, nor do I want to know, but thanks to that dream I am more comfortable in my skin than I ever was before. That dream marks the time when I stopped being a boy and I became a man. It is also the time from which I count my life as a writer.
All of this, thanks to the woman inside of me.
Yesterday I was lucky enough to interview Barbara Stepp, the world’s oldest NLP Master Trainer and DHE Master Trainer. For those who don’t know about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), it’s a system of personal improvement which basically teaches you to think more clearly and effectively by bringing your emotions under control and deliberately using them to inform your decisions.
It presupposes the existence of an “unconscious” in all humans, but not in the old-fashioned Freudian sense of being a mystic land of uncontrolled primal drives which are transformed into neuroses and psychoses as they come to the surface. In NLP, the unconscious is conceived more as an amazingly effective mechanism which regulates inputs to the conscious mind.
The point with NLP is that because the unconscious is by definition outside of our consciousness, we have never really been consciously taught to get the best out of it. That’s why so many people end up victims of their emotional states without even realising it. Undirected, the mechanism of the unconscious can send up undermining and disempowering emotions, just as much as affirmational and empowering ones. These emotions shape our expectations. NLP enables us to become masters of those emotions and hence of the decisions and actions we make and take in our lives. It teaches you to think on purpose.
There’s more to it than that. For example, those who do NLP, being concerned with emotional states, are interested in finding a
gateway between the conscious and unconscious mind. Such a state is hypnosis, that half-dreamlike state that enables the land of dreams and the waking mind to meet. Thanks to countless movies and tv shows, it sounds more mysterious than it is. The state of hypnosis is really very much like the state one moves through as one falls asleep, or that is achieved in meditations – or more prosaically, when someone really boring talks to you for too long. The eyes glaze over and you become absorbed in your own thoughts.
Barb’s story is often mentioned by Richard Bandler, the man who invented the term “NLP”. It is worth retelling briefly here. In the 1980s Barb attended a seminar being run by Richard in which he selected her from the audience as part of a demonstration of hypnotic age regression. He took her back to a younger time, and asked her unconscious to reset her body to that younger self. It was part of what Richard called his “Hypnotic Beauty Treatment”.
I have listened to the recording of that session, and it is a highly effective trance which left me feeling really “zingy” afterwards. With Barb it did far more.
What Richard didn’t know is that Barb had been told by her doctor to get her affairs in order. She had terminal cancer and was given 6 months to live.
Within weeks of the seminar, Barb returned to the hospital to have more tests done. The startled doctors now informed her that there was no cancer in her body at all. In those intervening weeks, she had got hold of a tape of the trance Richard had done on her, and had repeatedly used it on herself. At this time she had also undergone spontaneous remission.
It is always difficult in these cases to claim that such an event caused such a response. The scientists among your will by now be starting to hit the ceiling, and so I am making no claims here whatsoever. But what I can say is that Barb is certain that Richard’s intervention was key to her survival.
Barb is now nearly 72 years old, and is a wonderful presence to be with. Having been around for so long, and being so full of light and laughter, she has been given the title: NLP’s Fairy Godmother. The thing that really struck me about her is that she is continually looking to learn new things, and to have fun in life. Doctors have often said that survival rates among cancer patients for those with a positive attitude are much higher than those without it. Barb’s attitude to life is not only positive, it is pro-active in the extreme. She is a scuba diver, a mountaineer and a pilot. She got her pilot’s licence at the age of 65. She has a sparkle in her eye and is just a joy to be with because she is looking for fun in every single moment of her life.
If there is one thing that I took away from the interview to learn from, it was Barb’s attitude to life: “When I stop learning, then I will stop living”.
She assures me, she has no intention of doing either.
I heard the sentiment a couple of days ago, from someone who should have known better, and I answered clearly enough: “Yes. You’re right. What you’ve got in your head that you’ve decided is hypnosis… THAT is complete and utter bollocks. But then, I wouldn’t expect any more of you than that.”
Swirly Bollocks
So my rapport-building skills were not at their best on that day. But really, I have heard this sentiment repeated so often in different ways, from so many different people, who really should know better than to talk about something of which they have no knowledge and no experience.
Common objections to hypnosis come in at least three broad forms. Firstly, there’s the all-encompassing: “There’s no empirical evidence for it” argument, that I had with a pharmacist a little while ago.
No empirical evidence..? Oh, okay. So a woman comes into my office, having had a lifetime of bird phobia, having seen counsellors, undergone CBT, desensitisation and seen various psychiatrists that never touched the problem – and then, coincidentally in the time that she was sitting in my room, while I was coincidentally talking about ending her phobia, she coincidentally stopped having it. No empirical evidence? The assertion isn’t only unintelligible. It’s moronic.
Having established his profession with him, I thought it best to simply reply to him on his own level: “What scientific papers have you read on outcomes using an empirically-based methodology involving hypnosis?” He shrugged and mumbled something, and so I followed up: “Because, if you haven’t done the research, then don’t start the discussion. Otherwise it’s prejudice.”
Then there is the: “We all know it’s stage trickery” argument. Which would be a half useful argument if I was a stage hypnotist getting people to French-kiss mops. In that case, you use whatever you can to establish compliance. But I’m not a stage hypnotist. Telling me that someone who has come in to see me because they were terrified of birds for 60 years and who walked away 2 hours later able to feed the ducks on the local pond is the subject of a trick is simply incoherent.
“Oh, right. Okay. Someone just paid me a fee to get me to trick them into thinking they were no longer afraid of birds.” Who is being tricked, here? The client feeding the birds? Onlookers? The birds? I mean, what are you saying? Think a moment, will you?
The “trick” argument is bloody rude, too. Here’s a question I asked of someone who tried it on me:
“You do realise that you are calling me one of two things when you say it’s all bollocks, don’t you? Either I’m deluded about the changes that go on before my very eyes – or I’m a conman. Just so we can get things clear between us, which is it that you think I am? – A madman or a liar?”
Then there is the “lack of theory” argument. This one utterly makes me howl. “There’s no theoretical model for the effectiveness of hypnosis. Therefore it can’t work.”
This assertion is also close to being unintelligible, and yet I’ve heard it time and again from so-called “scientists”. They are no such thing. They are sheep in white lab coats. Just because someone doesn’t understand something, it doesn’t make it untrue. Edison invented the electric light bulb in 1878. Lorentz published his first paper on the theory of the electron in 1892. If we followed the argument that because we don’t understand it, it doesn’t exist, Edison would have had to drum his fingers for 14 years before filing his patent. It’s a nonsense.
As for me, I’m just waiting for the lightbulb moment to happen in hypnosis. Until then, I’m expecting to hear a lot more “bollocks”. But while a lot of bollocks is spoken around me, I’m also expecting to help a lot more people out of a hole, too
And in the end, that’s what really counts.
Walk into a pub in the Banana Republic, not far from the old Royal Marines Barracks on a Sunday afternoon, and you might be lucky enough to hear a woman singing some jazz numbers, backed by a pianist and a bass player.
She lilts out the numbers with a steady ease, lifting her smooth voice over the drinkers’ pints as they gather for a relaxed pubday afternoon, and weaving for a moment little pockets of joy and sadness, laughter and tragedy from that oh-so malleable raw material: sound.
“No Moon At All” – Helen MacDougall and her Musicians
This singer, with her dark hair and her lean figure I think of as The Southsea Birdwoman. She has sung in pubs and in clubs around the south of England, and she has played gigs to big audiences down at the Southsea bandstand. Thousands have basked on the grass by the sea, or danced swing, while her full band has filled the air with jumping rhythms.
But there is far more to the Birdwoman than being a singer. She is an unusual, massively gifted individual who has the hands of a builder, the muscles of an athlete and the voice of an angel.
Catch her on a summer afternoon down at the beach. She lives only a four minute walk from the solid shingle incline that shelves down to the sea. If you time it right, and the wind is in the right direction, you will find her taking wing on the waves – windsurfing over white horses, catching the air in her sail and scooting over the spray. Her tensed arms and her solid body taking on the elements, allow her for a moment to soar over the pale-green Solent on her single, white wing.
At work, you may find her in the trees, helping kids to find greater confidence by climbing with rope and harness up into the canopy. Or she may be at work building a bivouac, or showing kids how to light a fire and make artefacts out of wood: little pots from bark, perfectly made, with a lid and a base, as if a little craftshop has sprouted in a glade.
And at home, you may find her building her nest: hammering and sawing, making little additions to her home. The decking she built at the back of the house is a genuine feat of construction, with pillars of wood sunk deep into concrete, and a space where a tree has been given room to grow up through a hole specially cut. This is a sociable watering hole she has made, a lucky horseshoe of seats for friends to gather in the back garden on a summer’s day.
Indoors, for warmth in the winter, she has built a fireplace. She poured and set half a ton of concrete to build a suspended constructional hearth herself, and then put in place a cast iron Victorian fireplace. She has reboarded the downstairs floor, painted and decorated the whole house. Upstairs, completely unafraid, she took a circular saw to a wall in order to extend a room and build a clothes cupboard from the narrow space where an old boiler tank used to live. And she plastered over the place where the original door was so that it is now impossible to tell that it was any other way.
Consider her now: singing for all to hear, or flying on her windsurfer, or hopping high up in the trees – or again – building her nest – and now you understand why she is the Birdwoman of Southsea.
he Southsea Birdwoman
Walk into a pub in Eastney, not far from the old Royal Marines Barracks on a Sunday afternoon, and you might be lucky enough to hear a woman singing some jazz numbers, backed by a pianist and a bass player.
She lilts out the numbers with a steady ease, lifting her smooth voice over the drinkers’ pints as they gather for a relaxed pubday afternoon, and weaving for a moment little pockets of joy and sadness, laughter and tragedy from that oh-so malleable raw material: sound.
This singer, with her dark hair and her lean figure I think of as The Southsea Birdwoman. She has sung in pubs and in clubs around the south of England, and she has played gigs to big audiences down at the Southsea bandstand. Thousands have basked on the grass by the sea, or danced swing, while her full band has filled the air with jumping rhythms.
But there is far more to the Birdwoman than being a singer. She is an unusual, massively gifted individual who has the hands of a builder, the muscles of an athlete and the voice of an angel.
Catch her on a summer afternoon down at the beach. She lives only a four minute walk from the solid shingle incline that shelves down to the sea. If you time it right, and the wind is in the right direction, you will find her taking wing on the waves – windsurfing over white horses, catching the air in her sail and scooting over the spray. Her tensed arms and her solid body taking on the elements, allow her for a moment to soar over the pale-green Solent on her single, white wing.
At work, you may find her in the trees, helping kids to find greater confidence by climbing with ropes and harness up into the canopy. Or she may be at work building a bivouac, or showing kids how to light a fire and make artefacts out of wood: little pots from bark, perfectly made, with a lid and a base, as if a little craftshop has sprouted in a glade.
And at home, you may find her building her nest: hammering and sawing, making little additions to her home. The decking she built at the back of the house is a genuine feat of construction, with pillars of wood sunk deep into concrete, and a space where a tree has been given room to grow up through a hole specially cut. This is a sociable watering hole she has made, a ring of seats for friends to gather in the back garden on a summer’s day.
Indoors, for warmth in the winter, she has built a fireplace. She poured and set half a ton of concrete to build a constructional hearth herself, and then put in place a cast iron Victorian fireplace. She has reboarded the downstairs floor, redecorated and painted it all. Upstairs, completely unafraid, she took a circular saw to a wall in order to extend a room and build a clothes cupboard from the narrow space where an old boiler tank used to live. And she plastered over the place where the original door was so that it is now impossible to tell that it was any other way.
To consider her now: singing for all to hear, or flying on her windsurfer, or high up in the trees – or again – building her nest – and now you understood why she is the Birdwoman of Southsea.
She is an amazing character, a kind and good hearted individual – and one, I am pleased, to call my friend.
The cream of British tv…
A tiny moment of pleasure. Scene: The Street Outside An Acupuncturist’s Clinic on Palmerston Road, Southsea. Time: 3 p.m. The shop is divided into the clinic, and a private living space, and the door to the living area has been left open.
As I walk down the street I hear the sound of a piano being played, and passing an open door, see a little Chinese boy of around 5 years old intensely concentrating on the keys of a piano as he falteringly produces the tune to “Camptown Races”. I stand by the door and listen as he works his way gradually up the keyboard, changing the key as he proceeds.
A still moment. The traffic and people pass by outside, and he is totally focussed on his music. He’s not brilliant at what he’s doing, and he makes mistakes. But he corrects his mistakes, and carries on, teaching his fingers to pick out the notes in a certain order. I absorb his total concentration, as if it, too, is emanating from the room on to the street. Sensing him totally absorbed, feeling his way – learning, co-ordinating, learning, persevering. The sound is not pretty, but enchanting – and it tells a story.
We live in a muddled world, and that makes it fun, too. That little Chinese boy lives in a Victorian house in Southsea, where the English general public are treated with Chinese medicine, and plays a Black American tune on an old German piano.
I stand and enjoy.
These are the little pleasures of life.