SPINKLE, spankle – can you hear it? That’s the sound of shattered dreams. I imagine it is just like broken glass – your favourite cut crystal, the one that sat just right in the nook between your thumb and index finger, warming the brandy gently.
There are a lot of broken dreams around these days.
That game that was lost to Belgium, that was one. Even the skies cried bucket loads about that. But what about that goal against Ukraine and hey, what about Italy?
As a Euro 2016 widow, I hear the screams, the shouts, the wails from the deep quiet of the upstairs bedroom, as the field of football dreams is on a separate floor from mine. Downstairs is a floor where all the fixtures have been printed out and are stuck up in the hallway, to greet you on your entrance.
“Hello, nice to see you. What day is it? Ah, June 23 – who’s playing?”
Then, on entry to our living room, you cannot fail to miss the poster. It is on the lintel of my beautiful high breasted wooden fireplace – a feature if ever there was one – and smack in the middle there is a huge brightly coloured Euro 2016 Wall chart... lest we forget.
Someone keeps dropping hints about a 52 inch screen.
“For your birthday,” I tell him.
“The Euros will be over by then,” he sighs.
But the football hopes are not the only dreams that somebody has taken a hammer to, recently. My other half decided to break the news to me the other night. I think it was schadenfreude. It may have been something to do with me rolling my eyes and asking who was playing that evening.
“You know My Fair Lady,” he said one evening. Flatter me not, I told him... but he wasn’t calling me fair.
It was the musical.
Of course I do, I told him. I love all musicals and can trot out verbatim, “I’ve grown accustomed to his face”.
He on the other hand is about as familiar with My Fair Lady, The King and I and South Pacific, as I am with the two O’Neills and the north/south teams.
Although I love the song the fans sang to the Swedes: “Go home to your sexy wives.”
We have different passions.
“Well,” he said, a propos of Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.”She never sang any of those songs.”
This was upsetting. He had been watching a documentary. Apparently The King and I did not feature the singing voice of Deborah Kerr... it was Marni Nixon.
“And you know South Pacific – Some Enchanted Evening?” he went on. (Another soppy favourite of mine).
“Well, the actor never sang that either.”
The final nail in the coffin was The Sound of the Music.
“Christopher Plummer’s voice wasn’t strong enough and he did not sing Edelweiss,” he said.
“Apparently, he hated The Sound of Music so much, he called it The Sound of Mucus.”
Spinkle, spankle, never mind the sporting fields of France, all my dreams were shattered.
All those dark wet Sunday afternoons back home, watching the 12” black n white and washing that man right out of my hair.
All those sailors dancing in time and rocking out: “There is nothing like a dame.”
My Bali Hai just plummeted straight to the bottom of the ocean.
While the rest of the world was spitting with Sid Vicious, I was that young girl in the yellow marigolds in the back kitchen in our house, giving the dishes a quick rub to a rousing version of: “Whenever he needs me.”
By the way, Oliver wasn’t singing in Oliver either – it was a girl. Is nothing sacred?
My best friend doesn’t understand.
“It’s only a musical,” she said. “What’s the deal?”
But it is a deal, I thought they were wonderful singers as well as beautiful and great actors. They were real stars. But instead, there was a real life singer behind the curtain – often Marni Nixon – voicing it up. And it wasn’t fair on her either.
And it brought me back to other childhood dreams and the way our boy tried to cling to the broken wreckage of the Santa Claus story long after his mate had broken the sad news to him.
“Is there really, really a Santa,” he’d say.
And here was me throwing him a lifeline.
“There was a man called Saint Nicholas and he used to give all the children presents,” I’d say and leave it at that.
You don’t want to lie to your children but of course you do. It has always struck me as bizarre that we spend our lives warning small children never ever to talk to strangers.
Then, come December, we sweep them into a shopping centre and plonk them on to the knee of a total stranger, all in red and sporting a rather dodgy white beard and get annoyed when they bawl their lamps out. What is that all about?
Spinkle, spankle, by the time you read this, who knows whose dreams may have been shattered.
Meanwhile, I’ll be heartbroken down in our back kitchen, washing the dishes to a rousing chorus of: “I’d do anything for you, dear.”
