I was torn between two songs this week as the main post. There could have been many more contenders and there’s an amazing one from Nina Simone that will eventually be featured, but didn’t fit with what I’ve been been up to. Come to think of it, the actual song of the week doesn’t either, but I’ll get to that in a second.
The runner up is an oldie.
Let’s set the scene a little. You find that your hostel can’t book you in for Friday or Saturday night, so you manage to arrange somewhere else for Friday and then decide to head off on some trips. Saturday night you will be sleeping on a floating house on the River Kwae (Kwai) as part of a two day excursion, so what to do on Friday? I know, visit some temples. So I did and was trundled into a bus with a group of strangers for a fair few hours. I got chatting away with Sharron from the moment the bus door closed, she’s Scottish, a make up artist and doing a little trip of Thailand. But the rest of our excursion we’d not really chatted to. But that’s fine, everyone is doing their own thing, looking around, taking the pictures of monuments and thumbs up in front of a giant Buddha.
But at lunch time we were all sat around the same table having almost warm rice, sweet and sour chicken, stir fry cabbage and omlette. A song was playing. The American to my right said it was Celine Dion. He was correct. So I, of course, started a game, how quickly can you name the next song? This people guessing, however there was a mis-translation at some point as we then started predicting the next song. I said I’d really like some Spice Girls. One of the others suggested ‘2 become 1’. All agreed it would be a classic. Three tracks later – 2 become 1 came on. We all thought we were magical.
So that’s the runner up.
The main track, however, is a song that I first heard on the plane from Mumbai to Bangkok and I’m going to have to learn it. It’s haunting, it’s beautiful, it’s tender and sad. I love it. I don’t know how you couldn’t really.
Over hills and far away... 