Where the music takes me...

I thought I was such a rock chick dancing along to Def Leppard’s Animal. Thursdays were student night at the Hungry Years Nightclub. And that was the tune guaranteed to get everyone on the dance floor. “And I want, and I need, and I lust – Animal” 

Hang on a minute - I never knew until google that “lust” was in the lyrics. I was searching for love…

It was the late eighties, I was a student, probably a very naïve one, the only time I invited a boy back to my room for coffee, I really meant coffee! No lust whatsoever!

His name was Rob, I’d been eying him up all year across the dance floor or over breakfast – we were in the same halls of residence so he would have been sat three tables away and not directly opposite me with just a bowl of cornflakes and piece of toast between us.

It was nearly the end of the summer term, practically my last chance to find that elusive boyfriend before going home for the holidays.

We’d been to the ‘Years, as we used to call it, and somehow we ended up sharing a taxi home. It was probably Katie’s idea, she was also in our halls of residence and not afraid to talk to boys like I was.

So I made him coffee and we may have even swapped phone numbers and addresses but this was the era before social media and mobile phones; he never did get in touch.

Summer came and went. When we returned to the Hungry Years the music had shifted. It was all S Express and Pump up the Volume.

I spied him once more across the dance floor but by then he’d caught the eye of another girl. I think she was Scottish but where I got that idea from I’ll never know. But she certainly was a wee fresher who stomped in time to the beat. “Mini Stamper” was the moniker I gave her in my head as I glared in her direction.

Rob was captivated “I got the hots for you” as the song goes but I’m not sure if he ever looked longingly over in my direction again. Perhaps she made better coffee!

By the following summer he was all forgotten as a group of us sat on Brighton beach listening to Eternal Flame by The Bangles. By then I fancied Mike or was it Jon… If only either of them would notice me!  “Say my name, sun shines through the rain… I don’t want to lose this feeling.”

But even those flickers of fantasy turned to dying embers, the flames weren’t really as eternal as they promised.

A few years passed and then you came and turned my world around. As Whitney warbled I will always love you I knew I’d found my one and always. You were nothing like the boys of before. They were boys of summer, merely for a season.

But in the end so were you, but you were like autumn, forever.

And If I can’t have you, I will always have our song.