Stranger in a Strange Land

Wednesday 1st June

Leon Russell emerged in the late Sixties, and along with Delaney and Bonnie, and Joe Cocker embarked on the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour.  Leon was a piano-playing rocker from St. Louis and sang in a long drawn out Southern Drawl infused with the blues of the Deep South.  In the early Seventies he released his most famous album “Stranger in a Strange Land”.  It was one of many I bought in those years and I played it to death.  But it is the sentiment of that title that I think I associated with almost more than the song.  What was it like to be a stranger in a strange land.  Well pretty strange really, but in a way I had felt like that for years.  After all I ran away from School and Home at seventeen, and partly – maybe mostly – that was because I did indeed feel a stranger in Suffolk, and at school, though I played the part of the clown very well, I never really got the joke myself.  Or maybe I was the joke.  I felt I shouldn’t really be there most of the time.  I was living inside my own mind, daydreaming my days away, drawing as a form of escapism from a life I felt a stranger in.

So I left.  And London was another strange land.  All too quickly I became a father, and though I played the part well, I was just another stranger in the world of work, my colleagues or work mates had nothing to do with me, they were all free and single for a start and I was a single parent.  It was only late at night with Justin tucked in bed as I put another record on the Garrard deck that I felt at home.  And it has been like that, on and off, ever since.  I have tried the conventional route several times, subsuming my own personality even in an effort to fit in.  Maybe that was part of the reason I continually failed – who knows?

And maybe we are all strangers in a strange land.  It is impossible to really imagine what anyone else is thinking, so maybe they are thinking that they too don’t really fit in, are square pegs in round holes.  And the strangest thing is that it only becomes really clear to me when I am squeezed out of that round hole.  And yet I continually struggle to fit into them.  And all the time, smiling and agreeing with people I can never quite let myself believe that this is really me.  I am always looking down on me and observing and wondering if I am true, or just pretending.  And as I look around me at all the familiar people and things sometimes none of it seems real; I am just a stranger in a strange land and one day I will wake up and none of it will have happened.  Where will I be then? Back in my childhood bedroom, or tucking my son to sleep, or head-phoned and drifting into oblivion as I listen to that Southern Drawl of Leon once more?

Anyway, enough of all this introspection.  Tomorrow I will forget all this nonsense and be fine.  Maybe.