…your body starts to give you smaller and bigger hints that it’s not keeping together the way it used to. Decades do their work and there comes a point when you cannot escape the facts.
Which is to say I’ve been on radio silence in this blog for a while now, due to health issues that seem to be popping up now that I’m approaching sixty. I’ve been lucky in that I never had to deal with anything serious for about 55 years straight, but these last years…
Nothing bad or life-threatening, just things that mess up your everyday life a little bit and distract you from the really important stuff like seriously listening to Celtic, British and Nordic folk music and writing about it.
So, during this spring I have dealt with some health problems that were, thank god, totally fixable with surgery and, in that sense, not awfully serious. But surgery is always surgery, and in my case, there was a complication that was extremely unpleasant and extended the estimated recovery period for about a week.
I have learned that forced immobility and pretty constant pain can really take away any desire to enjoy culture or music. You just endure and trust that you will recover back to normal. Which I have now done, to maybe 80-85 % normal, which is okay for now.
I have a completely new understanding and compassion for people who have to live with mobility restrictions and chronic pain. And I hate our (= Finland’s) current heartless right-wing government for cutting social and health care benefits with an axe. They may know not what they do, but I don’t ask anyone to forgive them.
Seriously: what kind of government has a Minister of Finance who made herself famous by publicly declaring that “empathy has no place in politics”?
And so much for politics, before I get really mad.
I hope to now be back in the saddle with the blog, and I just like to say that right now I’m really enjoying the fairly new album, Bruce’s Halling, by that cosmically great American, Bruce Molsky, and that impossibly grand Swede, Ale Möller.
The 47 minutes of down-to-earth Scandinavian and American music with Bruce’s fiddle and Ale’s mandolin (and whatever other instruments he plays) is just so vitalizing and streaming with life itself that I recommend it to anyone who feels disconnected from their life.
https://brucemolsky.bandcamp.com/album/bruces-halling
I have too many new releases on my checklist to listen and write about, so I’ll just stop here and let you go about your more important business. Hope to see you here again soon! Thanks for reading – keep listening to good music and support your local musician! 🎶❤️
FolkNotes 