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Thank You For The Music

“Mother says I was a dancer before I could walk. She says I began to sing long before I could talk.”

                                                                                                            ABBA - “Thank You for the Music”

That was me, apparently. Or so I’m told; I may be a little hazy on the details.
My first public performances were at the age of two, serenading the local grocer’s shop with the recently-released Tom Jones classic “De-wi-wah” (Give me a break, Ls are hard when you’re two!) The customers seemed to like it and fed me chocolate. Granted, this could have been to give me something else to do with my mouth, but hey, this was back in the days before I got all angsty and self-conscious about the sound of my own voice, and just sang for the joy of it.

At school I straddled the uncomfortable line between “weird theatre girl” and “swotty academic”, though anyone who’s ever watched me try to count anything that isn’t musical might wonder about the latter. Both of these things put me in crosshairs of the mean girls and I was bullied relentlessly. You can imagine how much ridicule I attracted when I decided to try out for an inter-schools singing competition. I subsequently won the competition but the message had been received loud and clear - singing was not for the likes of me.