Inspired by Music book...Damian Lewis

"When I was a child, we used to spend summers in a beautiful big country house in Norfolk near Hunstanton. There was an attic that my brother and I would escape to and listen to music.

 They were summers full of the sounds of Madness (the first time round) and The Beatles (not the first time round). I was about ten. In truth, I might easily choose any one of their songs but as I sat daydreaming, looking out of the attic window, one song not so much inspired me as always haunted me and that song was Eleanor Rigby. As a young boy, it was a collection of sounds and images only. 

But even then, at the age of ten, it was startling to hear a song open with a choral: "Ah, look at all the lonely people." Even more startling to hear that Eleanor "wears the face that she keeps in a jar by the door ...." Now of course as I sit daydreaming and staring out of windows, something I am almost always doing when sitting at my desk, the song has a clear resonance: it is a song about solitude, but more tellingly, loneliness. 

It is a beautiful song charged with a pulsing melancholy. As a ten-year-old, I would listen quite literally to the lines: "All the lonely people, where do they all come from, All the lonely people, where do they all belong?" Now when I lsten to them, I think more of how terrible loneliness is. That no one should be allowed to be lonely. That no one should be buried "... along with their name." The most important thing we can do is interact with one another. To embrace one another with all our faults. It comes with frustrations, sure. But nothing is as awful as loneliness."