Friendship and psalms

The Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights, from Upper Coll, Back, Isle of Lewis. September 2003. Photo courtesy www.johnmacleanphotography.com

When you have lived on your own for an extended period of time, as I have, it is always, um, interesting to share your space with another for a while, particularly when that space is limited. Having G stay with me over Christmas was at once a pleasure: catching up on news, opening presents on Christmas Day, cooking lunch, watching films on television, and generally enjoying each other's company; and a low-level challenge: sharing the bathroom, managing access to the kitchen, trying to balance our various individual requirements.

G and I met some thirteen years ago when we lived in the same building in West London. Since then she has moved out of town and I have moved south of the river, and I now only see her a couple of times a year, though we keep in touch on the telephone and via email. We have taken holidays together, in Italy and in Ireland, and are planning to do some longer distance travel in a few years time.

In some ways we are very different: she is an intellectual atheist, I'm a non-specific believer who never went to university. She has a history of serious political activism and I haven't. She is slow and meticulous, I am perpetually in a hurry, with my mind always galloping ahead. But there is that mysterious factor X that means we just like each other. There are similarities as well - we are both now single with less than happy romantic histories, and interested in travel, other cultures and languages. We both have analytical minds and understand each other's tendency to worry and obsess. Intimacy in relationships is an ongoing challenge for me and I am grateful to G that she is willing to hang in there. In time I may even tell her about this blog!

Part of G's Christmas present was Salm Vol I, a CD of traditional Gaelic psalm singing from the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. She attended a live performance recently and is now an enthusiast, lack of religious belief notwithstanding. It is an extraordinarily emotive and raw style of musical worship, quite new to me, where the precentor (or leader) leads with a line of the psalm and the congregation responds. Gaelic psalm singing has its own specific musical and spiritual tradition, but similarities exist between it and other types of world music. In the words of the sleeve notes:

"The style defies description with so much of the sound texture relying on the congregation's original response to the melody and the individual precentor's leading. The musical term is 'Free Heterephony' , and in the hands of the Gael this became quite different from the original. In some black congregations in Alabama and North Carolina, a similar style exists, where Hymns are used rather than Psalms. There are also striking similarities to be found for instance in the singing style of the Coptic Church of Ethiopia."

Salm Vol I is unaccompanied singing, not immediately tuneful and in a language I don't understand. One reviewer describes it as being "...like waves crashing against the walls of the church, washing the congregation in a sea of sound". I've been playing the CD practically non-stop since Christmas.