Today, two suns blazed in my part of Paris.
One, which came out briefly, is that fat old star we city dwellers so often missed this summer, while the other is a glow turned on deep inside me by an "angel who isn't", when she told me from Shropshire this morning that she might be here around Christmas.
I miss Sandy very much now she's back in the land of our birth, but at last I can introduce this funny, stormy fire angel of a singer-songwriter who has spent most of her life on the outer margins of society.
If she can visit France at the end of the year, that would be fabulous, since we expected to be unable to see each other again until late next spring. Even then, we know we can never relive a phenomenal time we shared for several months from January 29, the night I heard those footsteps on the stairs.
Like a gift of divine grace
I ignored the first knock that Monday evening, because the front door of my small flat immediately adjoins that of my boisterous young Italian neighbour's apartment, and often it's hard to tell. At first I thought it must be Marco's girlfriend. When the next rap got me up to open my door, my jaw fell open too, so she says. All I could say was: "Sandy!"
Never mind how we first met through a mutual friend some years earlier. That's a long story, about when I was in a mess and so was she, rebuilding a life, but my habit of falling in love with witty, gifted and mischievous women like her very fast had to be reined in so hard that I did more than repress it. The truth is I turned it into a very deep kind of "Maybe one day" prayer. That was hard, but what was crazy was then to fall for someone else, on to whom I never projected Sandy herself, but my feelings got very mixed up. In short, I didn't know what was happening as of the spring of 2004; I couldn't forget the musician, but felt I would hurt her, and deluded myself over somebody different.
Yet there was Sandy that winter evening with a huge grin. That was the first time I saw the real, irresistible mischief in her clear azure eyes. She carried her most treasured possession in one hand, inside a very old, battered hard case covered in sticky labels, graffiti and sketches. She also held a big, ancient travel bag that I later discovered to have been hastily packed by a woman who had just taken her latest bashing, though she let none of that show for a while.
Sandy's first words that evening were: "Happy Birthday."
I didn't answer straight away for I was stunned. I could only gape until she put her boot into the door, which flew open wider so hard that the lock fixture has left a couple of big dents on the wood frame of the bathroom door, then Sandy shoved me out of her way and she was in.
"My God, this is heavy," I said, shifting her travel bag from where she dumped it as soon as she could, but she far was more gentle with her guitar case and leaned it against an arm of the sofa ravaged by an overweight cat who surprised me by staying put, sprawled there in spite of a Sandy who did more than make herself at home.
She began pillaging my cupboards to hunt out some food, made several rude comments about the supermarket microwave meals in the fridge and told me some of what she was doing there right then, which no longer matters. It was when this tornado stopped and Sandy plonked herself down next to a Kytie who still didn't budge that I reminded her it wasn't my birthday.
"It is now," Sandy said.
She grabbed the guitar case, took it out, fiddled with the instrument for just a moment or two, then started to play. Soon her sweet, rich voice filled the room as it was to do again sometimes for five months. I began to cry. Sandy says I then already realised what had really brought her to me. Maybe I had, especially on being asked to 'Imagine', before she played any songs of her own.
When it began coming together
After a brief pause while I simply took all this in, she went on into 'Strawberry Fields Forever', and it was after that Sandy gazed up at me from beneath her straw mop. There were tears on her own cheeks, but her eyes were bright and she smiled again. "Do you know what that's about?"
I told her that it was a psychedelic love song but Sandy laughed and shook her head: "It is, but really it's about us. It's about women's bodies -- those are your strawberry fields."
I also laughed, though whether it's true, I've no idea. Sandy was funny, dishevelled and very pretty and that evening, she at first looked far better than she felt, but it didn't last. She's a fit 43 years old, but she needed to lie down before we ate, which gave me time to go out and fetch a bottle of wine, since I never drink and had none. I even cooked before she emerged to tell me first about her week, then work backwards.
I've largely stopped cooking now for the same old reason: when you're on your own, it's different, but I do enjoy it. Given access to the kind of kitchen I sometimes got when we met people after starting work on a book about both Sandy's life and a whole different life and world she brought back through that door of my own, we had some fun weekends. The time we'll never forget most of all lasted 10 days until the bleak May 7 that I saw her on to a train for Nice.
Sandy then needed to stay for a while and chew over her near future with Camille, her closest woman friend, who she met in England 11 years ago, and who sometimes lived in Paris until she sublet her place here later this year. Before she did, we enjoyed some good times there. We called that Monday, when Sandy moved out of my own place, the end of our "Autumn in Spring". Cam was waiting at the top of the platform, for Sandy is as wise in foresight as she can be "wicked".
It didn't unduly surprise me to find Cam at the Gare de Lyon that wet, dismal afternoon, since that's how she is, but it's a measure of how much I had changed in the intervening months to say that I also took it in my stride, though with delight, to see she wasn't alone. The woman born in Provence was arm in arm with another Camille, who now lives mostly in Normandy, but that day she came to Paris -- for me.
Once the TGV had gone, Camille and I went to the apartment of her lovely, elderly parents, fairly close to where I live. I never went home that night. It felt like I was already finally "home" in a far deeper, richer sense, which I had so long repressed that doing it fuelled the volcano inside me that erupted last year. Camille's parents knew when to be discreet, among people who have long since abandoned leaping to hasty judgements.
I've known both Camille and Sandy for more than three years, while I got to know Cam and her husband Max in the first months of 2007, along with others. People like us share ethics and values that we seem to have acquired in a process Cam calls "growing down", since she's as fond of standing the world on its head as I can be. The others I've come to know better include Camille's partner Freddie, a real globe-trotter, who has no more room in his life than any of us find we do for jealousy, possessiveness, greed and that fear of loss that can be so destructive in relationships.
It's time I wrote about us all here, now that my own family and friends know about aspects of a life where Sandy and I soon stopped using words like "problem", "difficulty" and "hassle" about relationships. We feel that to do this is confrontational, when really the issues can be seen as challenges. Some of us are teased by others on occasion that we have a "missing gene". We are good at falling in love with people but almost incapable of falling out of it again.
The saddest challenge Cam and me both had to face, with great support from Max at that time, was Sandy's departure from France on June 30, several months before planned. Sandy was so torn between her need to be back in England and me, for I was going through a very tough time then:
"Why she had to go,
I do know,
But shouldn't say."
It's her business, at least on this Log.
Parallel lives
 Rachel Sandy Reynolds was also brought up on The Beatles and everything else that emerged in music in a 'Yesterday' whose lyrics I shouldn't mess with. By October 2, 1969, when I became 14, my family lived in a pleasant, ordinary suburb on the outskirts of London, but I was aware of a much wider world and as a teenager soon acquired friends who led me right out into it.
On March 29, 1969, Sandy had turned five. Within two months of her birthday, Georgina and David, her parents, made a decision that was to shape far more than a family's future. It was no easy road, but they prepared and took it, out of a small Cheshire town. Young Sandy became one of the first true "flower children" living on the fringe, quite literally the borders, of an England a number of us called Albion again. We urban dwellers, quite a bunch of us in the early 1970s, also spoke of the Underground.
Today, the French do the same. It's very much alive.
2007 isn't over yet, but I know already that it will go down in my memory as one of the most profound years of change in my life, like the one when I may only have been pushing 13 but was a precocious young lad. So were some of my friends. We were notably just as full of questions few adults could answer about what began happening in France in Mai '68 as we wanted to see a "swinging" heart of London for ourselves.
My next big year of change was 1980, when on August 10, I quit an England where I felt confined, doing the opposite to what Sandy did in 2002. We both hated the more hypocritical aspects of English society -- especially when it came to so-called family values and sex -- but I had for more than four years enjoyed a wonderful job mainly in music at the BBC and gave that up against the advice of most of my friends for a young French student I still love 27 years later.
Sandy came to France partly to find her musical way again, but it's too early to tell the full story, both for her and for me. She needs to sort out more of her own future now that she's back where she really belongs. When I wrote -- or narrated -- that book this year, few of my friends knew until it was almost done. Apart from Sandy, I had much help from others both in France and in England, as well as people in the United States, where her remarkable life had taken her into the "counter-culture" for a while.
When she came to France, with a Cam who was then coming home, it was also with immense courage. Sandy's whole life in music had been ripped apart in 1997, and much more went down with it. The kind of commune she was then in collapsed, two families were divided and there was a court case that led to appalling lies being written in a part of Britain's local press and even little inside page paragraphs of the gutter tabloids.
'No more heartbreak'
She wanted to start over.
She has begun to succeed and she'll make it. The picture of her and a little bit of Cam has to be discreet for now, but it was taken on a day that I've since been able to talk about to one young woman of whom I'm very proud, my daughter Marianne. However, I have yet to see again and describe the details and the fun we had to my friend Ellie, who asked me on one of my daughter's own big days this year, May 26, to "tell me about your wedding".
That word, as Eleanor, Manou and others know now, was shorthand. So are words like the Underground, though most of the French press I find of interest these days is about life and the people in what's really a broad, heterogeneous "alternative society" where I feel far more at home -- again!
It wasn't a wedding that Sandy and I celebrated with four witnesses and a few of our friends on March 22, this year's Equinox of Spring, not in any conventional sense, though we did swear vows and I can tell you what the main vow was.
It was also sworn by the two Camilles, and by Max and Freddie, since they wanted to join us in that vow, again more of a prayer, in light of their own life experience, love of other people and their sense of values. The picture above, in which Sandy and Cam are checking out a little something I gave her, was taken by Max at what we called a Ring Ceremony -- though there were no rings apart from a linking of hands -- where we swore: "No more heartbreak."
That really is quite a challenge, but we meant it, not just for ourselves. What Sandy's wearing, while Cam's got an expensive but gorgeous black dress on, you can't see, but never mind. She calls it "my lovely gold and blue dragon thing". I don't. I call it the "Killer Kimono."
My immediate bosses were very kind to both of us in the spring, allowing me an extra week off work while she stayed in this cramped flat at the beginning of May and telling us to make the most of it, when I'd run out of left-over vacation time from last year. I'm forever grateful to them for such generosity.
However, by May 26 I was in a dire state for unexpected reasons and really didn't want to be. That day I spoke to an Ellie who happens to have been born under a different ascendant and an ocean away from Sandy on the same day of the same year, Marianne "came of age". My daughter became a very mature young woman of 18. We enjoyed the party, but I was in personal trouble. When Marianne went on later this year to pass her Baccalareat exams with a Mention Très Bien, Sandy asked me what that meant and I said it's like getting A-levels with honours.
My own upset had nothing to do with Sandy's absence down in Nice and very little to do with birthdays, though they came into it, triggering a seismic mental event because of a string of coincidences. By the last week of May, it was lucidly clear to me and my doctor and close friend Luc, who has known me for 14 years, that I was in no shape to work, but I had to tell both him and my therapist that I didn't trust the latter over his drug treatment. Something had gone badly wrong.
Nor did Sandy, who came rushing up from Nice to be in an artistic community south of Paris and offered to live with me anew until I had pulled through, but we decided that would be a bad idea, since she has never been a city person and could stay with musician friends in an old, converted manor house near Saint Michel-sur-Orge, where they could work in peace.
I did pull through and Sandy's choice between leaving for England when she did and staying on was rendered much easier once I was in the hands of the therapist I have now, who believes only in basic medication indispensable for my Bipolar II condition and approves of the decision I made early this year to rid my system of others that have long done more harm than good.
This therapist, whom I trusted from our first meeting although her stupid predecessor "forgot" setting it up so that we had only 10 minutes together then, practices something called "systemic psychology". It's rare in France and remains controversial elsewhere, but it shouldn't be, since it makes sense to see people in terms of their relationships and balance that equilibrium with what they are as individuals.
During that time, though, a woman whose formal education went little further than that provided by Georgina, a qualified teacher, won many smiles and even a laugh or two from Luc. He respected Sandy's insight into the both of us, doctor and patient. I don't have a degree myself, I dropped out of university after a "break year" in which I earned cash and then headed off to India for several months.
To be able to do that in today's cut-throat world is inconceivable for a woman like Marianne, if she wishes to get anywhere, but that's only one of several comparisons I could make between life in the early 1970s and the sorry state of an equally sick society in 2007, where I've realised that I won't be logging any more once I've posted this.
A musical migration
Musically, I've slowly but long since migrated.
I have been back here since March from time to time, but only to tidy the Log up. I've been too busy since my girl with the guitar came to "fetch me home" -- her own words, once. Though I call Sandy my "girl with the guitar", my memories of our Autumn in Spring include the cat-fights she had with young Tracy, a fellow keyboard player who has a classical background and taught her what Sandy calls "people music" and I call tone poems.
Tracy is 24, like Keana, a Czech cellist who went to England with Sandy and with great excitement in her heart. The full story, which we have chosen to call 'The Fable of Sandy the Weaver', the nickname Cam often uses for her, and which is known mostly only to my family and closest friends, with a handful of my workmates, is far from finished.
The Camille I first met in 2002, now somewhere in Scandinavia with Freddie, is 37. Sandy's other "heart's love" Cam is a decade younger, but I'm particularly interested in talking more, whenever I can, to some of the still younger people in the book -- like I do sometimes with a very academically busy Marianne. If I've learned anything in 2007 -- there's so much I still need to assimilate and research -- it's that age doesn't have much to do with what really matters in our lives.
Experience plays its part, but most people I'm writing about are migratory birds in a different way from me, with my bonds to a largely urban existence I don't always enjoy, but where I have my freedom too. Once recovered from severe damage done by medication tried by therapists to whom my case was unfamiliar territory, I shall be out there sometimes to visit the Travellers, or the "fringe dwellers" as my currently Breton brother Jon calls them.
I want to go and see him and his family in Brittany when I can, and would have gone to England this year with Marianne had it not been far more important then to work intensively with a therapist who ruled out the wrong medication and understands me before she went on vacation.
What I have deliberately left out of this account is the "weird stuff" -- the cause of my personal woes. There was much of that about in May and June, since I have what we in the Underground call "gifts", though my therapist prefers the word "faculties". Many people do these days and I have my ideas about them, and why we do at this time in the history of our evolving species and the life of a planet I'm among those sometimes to call Gaïa. All I'll say is that it made me very ill when my gifts got out of control, which they did.
I've always had them, but to do so and with the wrong drugs in your system is bad news and it became a frightening time, not just for me. I couldn't have endured it without constant support from Luc, Sandy and Cam. Few of my family understood and I could hardly blame the ones who didn't at the time. Several people in England also helped, while Camille and a gifted Freddie, who has a gift like my own main one but more experience with it, came in from Normandy three times to see me and lend a hand.
By mid-July, my doctor Luc understood that, with further help I'm getting now from a therapist with special skills I was delighted to hear about, I may be no physician like he is, but I have a gift for helping other people that he understands. I can't be there for them, the way I want to from now on, learning as I go, do the research that is taking me deeper into music than ever, and maintain this Log at the same time.
Something has to go. People come first. So this is my last entry before I mostly migrate to Last.fm and other musical communities like it. Sandy knows why, better than anyone. Some people thought that when she arrived on January 29, she did through her gift of foresight and used that to know that I was ready. They were partly wrong; the reasons were more mundane.
Her foresight came into it, but what really told Sandy I was ready to set about mending her heart, like Cam already was, and to have my own mended by her and others who had begun that process in my life were the two Log entries I wrote that month. They weren't about me, but about two of the three things I treasure most in this world: music and women -- particularly those who make it.
The third thing we both love, "spoilt brats" or otherwise, is Kids. I've been amazed this year by my own daughter and her readiness to accept that her father has a different system of values from her mother's -- which I do, so we acknowledge this but each respect the other's -- without casting judgement on either of us, simply knowing that she has incompatible parents and readily accepting it. The age difference between Manou and Camille's parents may be a big one, but their outlook meets in the middle. That I find a very encouraging thing in this world.
7:35:01 PM link 
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