For my grandchildren Ellie, Theo and Finn.
By some considerable distance and for all I might say about the cooler likes of David Bowie and Joni Mitchell, never mind whole loads of classical singers, Lori McKenna is the one I’ve been listening to the most in the year just ended. And I know this because Apple Music has told me so. In 2024 she was the one. Good going given that before February 2024 when I started playing her songs, Apple’s told me that too, I’d never even heard of her.
Audio version:
A song of her’s called “The Tunnel” got played the most apparently, but that’s too hard-scrabbled a life story for this celebration of a day, the first one of a new year. When hopes are naturally high and wishes get traditionally made. And so thia second most played of Lori McKenna’s songs seems the best one to send you.
It’s about, well what she says it’s about here.
“When you’re my age I hope the world is kinder that it seems to be right now”
And as well as all the things she wishes, here are a few extras from me that I hope have come true for each of you, my grandchildren, when you’re my age:
I hope you get, or even become the better people running the country by then than the political types who’ve been running it since you were born. Even though I’m technically glad there’s been a Labour government for a few months now, I’m still waiting for them to actually do any of the things we elected them for.
Like, you shouldn’t have to be living in a place where so many people are sleeping in tents on the streets of the city centre when there are so many thousands of empty homes they could be living in.
And I hope having a home has become a human right before you’re very much older, never mind by the time you get to my age. Having spent half my life working in the industry called “housing” it’s of considerable shame to me that your choices and rights currently look so pathetic. My generation have let you down there.
And along with that I hope when you’re my age the country will love and value its children enough to give you back your free education. Just like housing, and health for that matter, these things should be the mere the building blocks of your life. All reliable and sorted so you can be putting your energies into imagining what you’d like to actually go on and do.
Finally, and before this turns into too much of a list for one day’s wishes, I want to go back to that bit of the song where Lori McKenna talks about the Lord’s Prayer. She’s clearly a Christian and good luck to her, and I’m not. But I do have a related wish her prayer makes me think of, one that all of humanity’s main faiths and philosophies have long shared. That in all you go on to do, for all of your lives, you will have treated everyone you meet as well as you can expect to have been treated yourselves. Because that’s how we’ll make a better world.
And to end on a song? Well what could be better than the same one. Sung here by Lori McKenna on her own. Beautifully.
“You’re still going to be my babies, even when you’re my age”
For Ellie, Theo and Finn. And hoping you don’t mind, for your mum and dad Clare and Simon too. The same wishes, the same emotions
xx
Narcissi photograph by Sarah Horton
Summed up perfectly as always Ronnie. ‘If wishes were horses then beggars would ride’. Let’s make it happen!
Thank you Eileen, good tears I hope.