Why I'll always fall for the drummer in the band

Dave and I were watching {500} Days of Summer a couple of weeks ago. There's a scene where the cute geeky guy is taking the piss out of the Zooey Deschanel character for her love of Ringo Starr. It's something like this - I can't remember the exact quote but you get the gist:

Tom: But he's the drummer! Nobody falls for the drummer in the band.
Summer: Exactly. That's why I did.

Dave poked me, and I grinned back. It's always, always, been my point. Why would you go for the lead singer? Firstly, everyone's going to fall for the lead singer, and dude, unless you've got the brains of Mo Mowlem and the body of Britney, you're screwed. On a bad day I have the body of Mo Mowlem and the brains of Britney, so I'm doubly screwed. Secondly, what's interesting about the lead singer? He hasn't learned to do anything much; he just warbles a bit and looks tortured. As for the guitarists; they're just wannabee leads with too much of an acne (or attitude) problem.

Whereas the drummer: he has all sorts of mental hand-eye coordination shit going on; plus, he has to enhance a tune, but tunelessly (well, percussively). And most to the point: who the hell chooses to be a drummer? Back there behind the kit with their brushes and sticks and pedals, where nobody can see or hear you? Bound to be the most interesting people to be around.

*****

Last Sunday, we were up at the coffee shop reading the paper in blissful silence (gotta love the neighbour-kid-swap thing) when I suddenly leapt out of the sofa squawking.

"What?"
"The "guess where I am" quiz - it's the Forest" "

Dave looked at me with a gaze best described as benign bewilderment mixed with a healthy dose of "here we go again with the sodding Forest of Dean". So I tried to explain why I am so relentlessly in love with the place of my birth, that tiny, chippy, loyal place that was the perfect place to grow up tiny, chippy and loyal. Look, Dennis Potter explained it better than me (no shit) in that final interview he gave with Melvyn Bragg:

my Forest of Dean childhood, well ... it is a strange and beautiful place, with a people who were as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me, and the accent is almost so strong, it's almost like a dialect.

In wittering on (at one point I said, to Dave, Dave who grew up in Oxford, for God's sake, "surely you see that, objectively, the Forest is the most beautiful place in the world?"),I realised that I have pick-the-drummer syndrome. The Forest of Dean is the ultimate hidden-behind-its-louder-mates, quirky, curious place. To stretch the metaphor tighter than a drumskin (sorry); from the outset it looks all dodgy haircuts and bits of wood, and sure, it is exactly that - but there's something incredibly compelling about just doing what the fuck you like but doing it with passion and vigour. Not all, but most of the people I know who are simultaneously the most driven and the most optimistic (sickening, right?) come from the same 10-mile patch of old oak and cedar. It can't just be the homemade scrumpy that brought this out.


Anyway, so that's that. I have pick-the-drummer syndrome for all sorts of aspects of my life. I think it's why I loved Seattle so much. If you're living in London and think of moving to the US, you pretty much think New York or possibly, possibly, San Francisco. Seattle isn't even the bass player in this particular band - most people, let's face it, think it's in Canada so it's not even in the same damn band.

It's why, when picking our kids' names, we deliberately printed off the Top 10 and automatically discarded them.

And it's certainly why I married a man who, when looking at a guidebook to Sicily, said, "Let's go west - the book says everyone goes to the east". Now all I need to do is find him a pair of drumsticks.