We call it "Tappie"

This is the little bird who still taps on our windows every morning. We've decided to call it Tappie.
This picture refers to my post about Reincarnation. Please check it out!

Have you got Soul?

It just occurred to me that I haven't actually written anything about music in this blog. How could I forget?
Just going through some songs I have in my iTunes and on my iPod. I have a very broad taste in music and listen to lots of different genres. However, I think it's the soul tracks that have made the biggest impact on me over the years, or so it appears. (Why do they call it R&B these days?)
So I thought I'll put up a few tracks here of artists and songs that I like. Hope you enjoy them too.

Richard "Dimples" Fields, a lesser known artist who sadly passed away in 2000, only 59 years old. He recorded quite a few albums and did a few duets, the best known one is probably "She's got Papers on Me". Here, however, my all time favourite "Jazzy Lady".



Another great singer is undoubtedly Willie Clayton who I only discovered recently. He's been around for a long time, but someone I missed this fantastic singer. Here's a great duet he did with Pat Brown: "Equal Opportunity". He's sung a lot of great ballads, so make sure you check him out.



Sometimes it's hard to define what exactly Soul is. I'm sure cleverer people than me have analysed and written about soul; but for me it's the feeling that is brought across by the singer, so some of the songs I'm mentioning here may not be pure soul but could be classed as ballads or blues or jazz. I don't think there are any clear cut lines. The question is: does it really matter?

Here is the famous late Lou Rawls who I had the pleasure of seeing live in London. He sadly passed away a couple of years ago. He did tons of good stuff, but this video shows the great man live in concert with "You'll never find":


I'll leave it at that for today, but if I haven't bored you and if you like this kind of music, please check back here soon as I'll be continuing by personal voyage of Soul Searching.

Do you believe in Reincarnation?

No, don't worry, this is not going to be a philosophical post about reincarnation but rather an account of a strange thing that's happened here:
For the last month or so, I've been waking up every morning to the sound of ...hammering. That's what I thought it was to start with. But the only person who would use a hammer in our house would be my husband, so when he's lying next to me in bed, he can hardly be doing DIY work at the same time.
So I investigated the noise.
And there it was: a little bird, a great tit to all accounts, was hammering against the window with its beak, flying up and down outside the window and pecking at the glass. It looked like it was trying to get into the house.
Since my first observation, this has happened every morning and sometimes during the day as well. The tit flies to different windows of the house and starts pecking. Not one morning has gone by without me waking to the hammering noise.
We have been talking about this at home and the most likely explanation we've come up with is that this bird is, well, a reincarnation of a person or animal who lived in our house some time in the past. We first said this jokingly, but the more we think about it, the more sense it makes.
The only animal that has died here in the last few years is our cat who was allowed in the house, but she wouldn't have been in the upstairs bedrooms. But it's those windows in particular that the tit pecks at as well as the living room downstairs. And it positively looks like it's trying to get into the house.
Our house is an old house and many generations of people have lived here over the decades, so assuming that reincarnation exists, why shouldn't it happen here?
I'd be most interested to hear from people who have observed something similar. Or maybe there's a zoologist among you who has a perfectly reasonable explanation for this bird's behaviour?

I posted a picture of the little bird in this blog 31st October 2009.