My life sick in Mu, part ten...

I CAN DO THAT

Music didn't play a huge part in my fan life at first. Not for quite a time, in fact. Seacon 79 gave place to other, smaller, more purely media-based cons, and I met the lady who was to become the lodestar of my life, and I moved from a grotty bedsit in Streatham to a grotty flat in Crystal Palace (unofficial) to a slightly less grotty flat in Penge.

Before that, however, I'd met Soren. Though he wasn't Soren then.

I was still writing The Ivory Tower, despite the fact that I'd completely lost the plot and had no idea how to get from where the middle was now to where I wanted the end to be. By now it was becoming less a novel and more a way of processing what was happening to me, and as part of this I was incorporating some of the friends I had made in fandom into the text as characters. Two of them were Clement and Soren Nyrond, based very firmly on Charles Thornton and Sam Armitage, members in good standing of the London Plus Group. The name "Nyrond" had been with me since college days, appearing in the third Gleitzman comic book, and I have no idea where it came from except that it was definitely not from the World of Greyhawk tee em, where it appears as the name of a country. The World of Greyhawk wasn't even born then, to my knowledge. One of those ideas sleeting through the universe that Sir Terry tells us about, probably. It was in TIT (an acronym I have never used before and hopefully will never use again) that the Nyronds started to take the form they eventually would settle into, as smooth-talking strangers with a penchant for deception and fraud. This was and is no reflection on the real characters of my friends, though it may be a reflection on mine...

Anyway. Soren and I clicked on several wavelengths, and we began to meet up at a student hall of residence in Mecklenburgh Square, known to him of old, where we could sit and talk and buy drink at reduced rates in a big room full of dilapidated chairs and scarred tables. And in the corner of that room, there was a piano.

After a while I started to go over and play it. Nobody objected, nobody banned me or anything, and I began to recover something of what I laughingly call my technique. And something odd started to happen.

I'd encountered, at the various conventions I'd gone to, a chap named Chris Chivers, who sang songs about space travel to a battered guitar in a voice, like the man said, that came from you and me. Most of the songs on his first album, which I had bought on tape, were about being a wanderer and outward bound and all that, and Soren and I both enjoyed them very much, but I started to feel that maybe it was all very well. At least he knew where he had come from. And a little voice in my head started off:

"How well you sing of wandering, with Terra safe behind..."

I'd written lyrics before, of course, Gilbert and Sullivan parodies by the bushel, mostly on themes of drunkenness and lechery for my fellow members of the Church Of Yurinn (don't ask). But this one seemed to be coming with its own tune. That was new. I'd written tunes as well, one or two, but never ones that went with words.

Soren seemed to like it too.

I had included myself among the Nyronds as well, as "Tully," a gormless clown who got everything wrong. At some point as we talked, and began to sketch out ideas for stories about the Nyronds, the idea emerged that I could give myself another Nyrond persona, one that wasn't comic relief; maybe that way I could get away from some of my self-perceived failings and past idiocies and, in a way, reinvent myself. I can't remember which one of us suggested this, but the name "Zander" was definitely Soren's idea.

And I really should have made a note of the date, because it's not every day you get reborn.