Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key

Author:Amy Key [Key, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

STRANGERS

will you take me as I am?

At the start of my three-week trip to California, deranged with jet lag, I found a cutting of a review of Blue on eBay, from a 1971 issue of Melody Maker. I hoped I would find some magic bit of Joni memorabilia that would inspire me to write. It only cost a few pounds so I bought it, and it was waiting for me when I arrived home. The review argued that Blue ’s songs were ‘hard to relate to’, the ‘problem’ of the record ‘one of empathy’. The experiences cited were ‘the sweet dilemma of being stuck in Paris when she wants to be in California’ – her ability to fly on a whim to Amsterdam and Rome were ‘divorced from our field of experience’. It felt bewilderingly off for me, ridiculous that Blue ’s lyrics could be considered unrelatable, when I relate to it so powerfully and came to feel that way before I’d even fallen in love; and many years before I had travelled outside of England for the first time. I thought Joni wasn’t singing about travel as much as she was singing about finding a way to be herself, to belong within a place wherever it was.

*

In my youth I believed that to go on holiday abroad was to acquire glamour. All it would take was one week in a sunny European resort, an immersion in strangers, and I would be granted access to it. Become liberated from my homeliness, small-town experiences, from the daily sense of making do with hand-me-downs, bland food, the thudding boredom of schooling. I perceived glamour as terrific ease in the world, erudition and imagination, with no labour or artifice to my conversation, mannerisms and style. A polishing of what was latent within. In this way, travelling abroad seemed to parallel the idea I had of romantic love, that it was my destiny, and with it I would step into a truer self. I wanted to be like one of the kids at school, who after a break would walk back into classes with streaks in their hair from the sun, skin pale around their eyes from wearing sunglasses, with the swagger of chaste holiday romances. A temporary celebrity in the playground. My own family holidays were infrequent, domestic and unphotogenic.

I was about to turn twenty-one the first time I left the country. I used some of my student loan to pay for it, my debt already feeling elephantine and pointless to resist. The people I met at university had taken gap years, gone all over the world, had the type of resort holidays I’d idealised as a kid. I didn’t always envy their trips – backpacking sounded heinous to me, all the scrimping and discomfort and trust fund babies – but I did envy the broadened palette of experience they had to draw from. They had more colours than I did, and I saw glamour as a richness of expression. I wanted to be perceived as someone who had travelled.

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