Mrs Mackerel has decided to take a short sabbatical and invite some friends, relatives and countrywomen to takeover her Friday night post, a Friday routine as regular in this household as a G&T with lime, or pizza Margherita for the sprats.

For week three, we hand over the reins to Big Sair…

And with a flourish of my long fishtail, I take the baton for this third week of Mrs M’s sabbatical.

We had joy, we had fun, but no season in the sun in 2012 – I’m with High Priestess on the heating and cardi.  The year end looms and with it, changeover and return to more certain seasonal traditions. We swim our way downstream towards the winter solstice, a frighteningly close prospect for a cold-blooded shoal-dweller.

Mrs M and I trafficked – as always, directionally challenged – with a new entertainment Saturday last, venturing from the Wolds to the Southbank Centre to see Cantina. With tight-rope highs, plunging lows, and a definite fish-eye lens on the male form, we enjoyed the change of tack, but are happy to return to the usual musical format for our next outing: the Walkmen (whose rightful responsibility is to make girls cry, according to Mojo) on 1 November. Pass the Kleenex.

Autumn always makes me slightly melancholic – change can be good, but unsettles my scales. Mrs M’s Sprat 1 and my D1 both celebrate more years than we care to acknowledge in the first half of October: slip sliding away. Casting my mind back to when they were little, my thoughts wander off to the safety of the four corners of old, new, borrowed and blue …  and a silver sixpence in her shoe. Not just for weddings, methinks. … For me, there is safety in numbers and music, the latter having the uncanny ability to transport me back and forth in time like the tide. My repertoire may be slightly shallower than the bigger fishies, but as the longest fish in the shoal, my waters run slightly deeper than may first appear.

With love

Big Sair (tall, not wide) xx

Old: Download This Mortal Coil – Song To The Siren mp3 (from It’ll End In Tears)

New: Renny Field – Doin’ the Time (from Fieldnotes)

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Borrowed: Download Neil Finn – Throw your arms around me mp3 (from Hunters and Collectors cover)

Blue: Download Indigo Girls – Power of Two mp3 (from Swamp Ophelia)

A Silver Sixpence in her Shoe: The Walkmen – Dance with your Partner (from Dance With Your Partner 7″)

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