My brother Mark would have been 64 today had he not died at the age of seventeen in a stupid accident. He had been drinking with friends and was riding his motor cycle home. They were fooling around and he rode directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The whole family was of course devastated and probably never recovered from that.After the funeral I went back to college and took his record collection with me. They were all 45s and quite a lot of them were by Fleetwood Mac. I didn't even know that he liked them, and I remember sitting in my room playing them for hours on end. Albatross, Man of the world and Oh well must have driven my neighbours mad over a few days, but they did help me to come to terms with his death, something that my parents never did.
I understand , I think, why some people find comfort in their religions. It probably enables them to imagine their dear departed to be in a better place and still in some way alive. For me and many others, death is an ending, not a beginning. Mark will be remembered by the few family members who still exist and his images will probably somewhere exist even after that.
The summer of that year, 1968, my cleaner, yes we were spoiled in those days, tidied my desk and put a pile of records on the windowsill in full sunlight. Vinyls do not cope well with heat and when I returned to my room, they looked like a pile of black poppadoms so my physical link to him had gone.
Now I have access to whatever music I wish to hear, but Albatross on a scratchy vinyl would still sound wonderful.
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