54. ADVENTURE

 

I started getting involved with music in May 2028 and this happened within the boundaries of my wanting to make an old dream come true. I didn't compose my own music, but I covered an album, working with Johanna, our new vocalist. When I was a child and I had just discovered Celtic music, I'd just found out about a record with Welsh songs, which also included the very first song I ever sang on the Celtic festival: Y Ddau Farch. Since then I have had a very distant dream to cover this album, using musicians from my own background and not the band. This dream of mine existed much before the band was formed, however, I'd known Bryan since then, so I was thinking I'd definitely work with him too. The whole situation fitted perfectly to me now, because I had met more people, who were playing Celtic music and I was sure they would agree with my idea.

The two first people I thought about were Johanna and Bryan. So, one fine morning I called Johanna.

"Hello, it's Johanna", she said half-awake.

"What do you think about the idea of me and you covering an album with Welsh songs?", I said abruptly, without even saying good morning.

"Err...I think it goes well with me...but what do you exactly mean?"

I cracked up and said: "Fine, when you're totally awake and have a coffee, call me back".

Finally, Johanna called me fifteen minutes later and said to me: "What were you exactly telling me about Welsh songs? I didn't catch a single thing".

"Listen", I replied. "When I was a kid, I had an all-time dream to cover a specific record with Welsh songs. Would you like to participate in that project of mine?"

"You mean sing?"

"And play the guitar as well".

"Of course", she answered. "I'm not sure I've ever listened to that album, but Welsh songs, this sounds...WOW!"

I smiled. "This is gonna be an unforgetful experience".

Of course, it would be. I would bring everybody here in Australia and whenever we weren't recording we would take the day off to journeys all around Australia and the islands.

"And do you intend to get more people involved in that?"

"For sure. Bryan is surely going to be in. We also need Nancy in the pipes and I'll probably need musicians from Yorkshire. I'll ask Bryan whether he can call some of them from Blakey Ridge".

And this is what happened. Bryan found my idea wonderful and he instantly rushed to call musicians, most of which I already knew. They were common friends of both of us who were playing music mostly at the Blakey Ridge but also at the Celtic festival in Ireland. I spent the whole summer, 2028, adapting the songs in Musescore 3, so that I could divide the parts in which every musician would play. The way I was working on was exactly the same as the one I was working on when composing symphonic music. Only that instead of symphonic instruments I'd use traditional ones.

An additional member of my project would be Shonna, Bryan's partner. I haven't spoken about Shonna so far, however, I'll make a long reference to her. Most people think I'm so bonded to Raglan Hundred, only because I've got a family with them. What most people are unaware of, is the fact that I have friendly relations with the rest of the guys. Indeed Shonna is the last person I became friends with before 2021 and we are still besties. It's true that I got to know Raglan Hundred through Vivian and Bryan, but there's a gap in the whole story. Most people think I got to know them in 2022 or 2023 after I'd moved back to Norway. However, this is how the whole story goes. In 2021 I'd seen Raglan Hundred live at the Blakey Ridge when their vocalist was still Lisa Harrington. Shonna was just 20 years old and had just joined the band as a backing vocalist. Lisa was the main vocalist, not Shonna. Bryan hadn't met Shonna yet. Sometime later, when I was in a terrible state at the hospital, Vivian visited me bringing Ingmar along. That beautiful day Ingmar and I met for the first time.

Shonna and I met each other in a completely unexpected way. I think it was during some exhibition in Yorkshire, which she had attended too. I recognised her because she has that distinctive red hair colour -- the same shade I wanted for years for myself and which I could never get right. And I told her, therefore this is how we got into contact. I told her that every time I see red-haired women, my heart is broken because I have always wanted to become like them too. And as I said, I instantly recognised her because I had watched a live show of the band and her voice had impressed me so much. Shonna had one of the purest and most beautiful voices I had ever listened to and it seemed so bizarre to me that Bryan hadn't ever listened to her before.

Shonna and I got along very well with each other right from the beginning, but I was so scared to approach her because I had had all these traumatic experiences with my so-called girl friends. However, Shonna was different. She wasn't a blonde wishy-washy chick. She was an innocent redhead and she was such a ... child. She was so young back then. At some point, we discussed the fact that most of my friends in Ireland were rats and she replied to me the same about her friends in the UK. That's why I started to care about her and I wanted to protect her from the poison. Exactly because I had always been so innocent and had nobody around to protect me, I wanted myself to protect this good-hearted creature.

After that, I introduced Shonna to my friends too and they were so willing to accept her in the company. And through me, she met Bryan as "Raglan Hundred's second vocalist". Bryan was impressed by her voice and by...well, by her red hair, of course...and by her as a person. And the rest is history.

To come back to my main point, Shonna was going to be one of the first people who would work with me on this project. In September, when the transcription was over, we went to the studio. I think these were the best sessions we'd ever had. The guys stayed in Australia for almost two months and whenever we took a day off, we'd go on excursions. We'd take long drives in Ocean Road. And because December was close, it was summer in Australia, so we could go for a swim.

Our excursions didn't always have a happy end. I remember some point when we were at the beach close to Melbourne and we decided to do some sea sport. When my time came, I decided to ride a jet ski. However, it is common knowledge that my body balance totally sucks. The jet dragged me so powerfully that I lost my balance and landed on the water as if I were a bag of potatoes. The issue, though, was that I fell on my back and hurt my ribs, so for a couple of weeks, I could barely move my shoulders. Therefore I never tried any water sport again, except for rafting or kayaking.

Furthermore, Australia is full of dangerous animals especially marine animals. One day we went to another beach, where I was stung by jellyfish. Fortunately, it wasn't that painful and I needn't go to the hospital, however, I had jellyfish tentacles on my body for days. I was quite lucky because in Australia lives a species of blue jellyfish, which is considered to be the most dangerous species in the whole world. Its sting is fatal to humans!

The worst experience I had in Australia wasn't with jellyfish, though. One evening I went down to the garden of my house in order to dig up some weeds. There was a bunch of weed on the ground, which had to be gathered up and thrown away. However, as soon as I picked up a bunch, underneath there was a huge black coiled snake. I sprang back some kilometres away and started screaming like a little girl. I am extremely afraid of snakes and, for those who don't know this, I have never managed to watch this scene in the first Indiana Jones movie, where he is surrounded by snakes. I always leave or close my eyes. Therefore I suffer from ophiophobia! Anna and Ingmar rushed out to see why I was screaming like that and when I told them about the snake, they started giggling at my little adventure.

So, except for recording, we used to go on journeys. Apart from my friends, I'd also travelling along with my family, but in more distant places and usually abroad. As long as we were living in Australia, it was easier for us to travel to the islands of Oceania; places I'd always dreamt of travelling in.

When I was younger, I used to watch documentaries or several series featuring exotic journeys to islands and since then I fell in love with islands. A surreal and wonderful dream I have always had is to get on my little boat and sail on every island of Oceania. One night I had this completely absurd dream. I was in the Galapagos Islands (Exactly! I suppose I wanted to take a look at Darwin's tortoises) with my family and we were swimming. Then we reached the coast and entered a hut, in which some people were playing music that sounded like a mixture of tribal and Latin music. After listening to their music, we headed towards our little boat. Suddenly, a huge tsunami approached us, which not only didn't get us drowned, but it was like a sort of means of transportation, as it threw us on some coast of Papua-New Guinea.

Some other time I had an even more bizarre dream. In general, during the time I was ill, I used to travel thousands of miles around the world, using Google Earth. Sometimes I would only watch the ship routes if, for example, some ship was travelling from the Caribbean coasts to the islands of Oceania. And the dream I had at that time was I was on that voyage, myself, along with my family and while we were in the Ocean, we were surrounded by enormous waves. No, this was no nightmare. We would successfully brave the waves and for us, it was quite an adventure.

I knew why I had these dreams. I had a lust for life and the fact that I had overcome cancer was a great challenge for me. I was convinced I was going to live for many years, that I would die very old, but of course, I had to keep my hopes in check. Even though I was sure about my life, this doesn't mean that I would be completely inactive for the rest of my life, thinking I can put off anything I desire or have to do. Wise men say, Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

That's why I had to learn that nobody can survive on their own, to start with. Therefore I'd live all my adventures along with my family. And furthermore, I would indeed get into an adventure, this was something I'd definitely do. I didn't consider what all these madmen did in documentaries utopic anymore. It's just that a journey in exotic islands needs money, time and an excellent arrangement. Ingmar and I could achieve that. Both of us (and Anna as well) loved to plan to get into new adventures and our own future as well.

Therefore in the summer, we stayed in Sidney only for the recording session. The rest of the time we were planning to travel to the islands of Oceania. We went to Papua - New Guinea, Fiji Islands, to Tahiti, to Bora Bora Islands, to Micronesia, to the Solomon Islands, to Vanuatu, to the Marshall Islands and many many more. It was a huge cruise, unforgettable for everyone, especially the child.

In September the sessions for the record went on. I have already said that we were only covering a Welsh folk music album, which I was listening to when I was fifteen. That's not absolutely true. Through our cooperation with Johanna, a common song of ours was born: Goodbye Voyager. It was a semi-acoustic, semi-Celtic and semi-rock song, which would be often played live in the future.

Although Johanna and I had originally known each other for more than twenty years, we'd been real friends for almost three years now. We'd get to know each other better day by day and I'd realise how many things in common we had and how very much of the same skin we were. When I was a kid, Vivian used to call Johanna and my sister Johanna squared, but, as revealed, she had more things in common with me rather than my sister. She would protect me as if I were her younger sister. And for those who don't know, Johanna had studied linguistics and the topic of her PhD was islands (for non-linguists I'll explain later what islands are --anyway they have nothing to do with actual islands surrounded by the Ocean).

Recording sessions were done and the album was released in November 2028. Its title was Music and Dances from Wales. Its title wasn't anything special and we even cheated a little bit. The music wasn't from Wales exclusively, because there was a composition of ours as well.

You can see that, during all this time, I had recovered and I was active constantly. My nutrition was improved, even though I necessarily was a vegan. I've been a vegetarian, since I was 20, and, as after the operation my stomach couldn't handle dairy products anymore, I had become a vegan. I didn't have any problem with that at all and I furthermore felt my stomach lighter and I suffered no heartburns or refluxes anymore.

I had started to consider that it was high time we returned home, to Kirkenes. But there were two things that would keep me back. The one was the course I was attending, which I hadn't completed yet. I was thinking I could quicken my graduation time, but this was impossible to happen before summer 2029.

The next issue was my students. I didn't teach in that school anymore and with great sadness, I waved goodbye to my old students. However, I used to have some students at home. These were refugees, which I used to teach privately, because they couldn't keep up with school lessons, due to their lack of language comprehension. Children used to come to my place every evening. And there were so many!  I didn't want to have a typical relationship with them only, that's why after the lesson I used to give them fruits and porridge (just like my aunt used to do to her students) and we would chat a little bit. At some point, my heart was broken. Some of my students were refugees, who got to reach Australia from Syria. They didn't have good reception in Europe, because they were illegal ones (because the government wouldn't give them a residence permit and it's not refugees to blame for), so the children were literally sleeping in the streets. Some of them had seen their own house being demolished, the three-year-old sibling of a student of mine had seen his mother being massacred before his very eyes and many similar freaking stories. How could I ask for money from these poor little souls? In case some of them were of greater financial status, they would give me a small sum, but in no case would I ask anything like that.

Therefore I was doing every job in the world. I was a teacher, a gardener, a good mother, a good wife, a housebuilder etc. However, I didn't dare to touch Art yet (except for the Welsh music album, which was a promise I'd given to myself fifteen years before). Art would appear again sometime later, when something would spark my interest so much, that I would be able to express it only through the making of a new album.