By The Landlord
”Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” – William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116
“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” – Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
“Death ends a life, not a relationship.” – Jack Lemmon
“Let us roll all our Strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one Ball:
And tear our Pleasures with rough strife,
Through the Iron gates of Life.
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.” – Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress
Perhaps, then, for me, the most surreal of such experiences came just after dawn. I opened my eyes, squinting in the emerging sunlight, and, as I looked up, her naked form strolled softly by, padding across the sand, silhouetted. I thought it was all some bizarre dream. Then I saw she was not alone. She was joined by another. They walked, hand in hand, towards the water, gently immersing themselves in the lapping sea. I drifted into sleep again. Then a few minutes later, they re-emerged, and I woke again as they slipped by, dripping, quietly chatting and laughing, seemingly impervious to my presence, still naked, back to the shore, through a garden gate, and into a nearby house. They were both at least 80 years old, and in that moment I realised this couple had probably done this same routine every morning for most of their lives.
To put this into context, this happened quite a few years ago. I was 18, travelling around Europe on a shoestring budget (£5 a day for everything) with a school friend, and we had searched, with our sleeping bags, for somewhere free to sleep. It was on the southern coast of France, just outside Nice. It was illegal to sleep on the beaches in that area, but I'd worked out that if you left town far enough, the police wouldn't bother you. I'd shared this information with some befriended, random travellers we'd met on a train, and after a wander up the coast, there we all slept in a row - me and my mate, two girls from Finland, and a couple from Portugal. A bizarre, but memorable scene in which to witness a wrinkly, but extremely healthy aged couple enjoying the simple lifestyle of timeless love and companionship.
So then, this week, as our own enduring and beloved Song Bar establishment celebrates its seventh birthday, the latest theme, after so many others, is everlasting, perpetual, abiding, ceaseless, continual, constant or amaranthine love. Of course there have been many love song related themes, and also, just over a year ago, the wider and sometimes more conceptual theme of eternity, which brought an almost perpetual momentum of song suggestions, and excellent resulting playlists.
A huge majority of songs are inevitably about love in some form or another, whether wanting it, declaring it, celebrating it, broken-heartedly having lost it, or it being unrequited.
But everlasting love is a more specific theme, yet still comes in many forms and broadly speaking, these might be affected by the perspective of time and circumstance. Some might express everlasting love during the first blossoms of romance, as joyful promises of certainty, declaring that it will continue forever. Others might celebrate it after many years of it being proven. And then, perhaps even more potent, are those in which that love was cut short, perhaps by an unfortunate turn of events, such a tragic young death, and so its feelings are forever frozen in time.
Love that abides, even though it is lost, often by death or other circumstance, has a resonance in song just as much in other genres, such as the storm-driven romance of Heathcliff and Cathy, or in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, in which the former declares, just before poisoning himself before his lover's still body to enshrine their love in what would seem the most romantic way:
“The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!”
But for the long-term and the living, is there a secret to everlasting love in a distracted world of stress, temptation, affairs and divorce? Looking into some of the longest ever record-breaking marriages at least, some themes emerge. While there are two unconfirmed cases of marriages that lasted more than 90 years, the longest ever officially recorded is that of centenarians Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher of North Carolina, school sweethearts built a staggeringly impressive 86 years and 290 together, until Herbert died in 2011, aged 105.
Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher enjoyed a marriage of more than 86 years
There are several other cases of enduring marriages of 85 years or more across the world, from Taiwan and Japan, India, the US and Italy, but the current living longest married couple, are Ron and Joyce Bond, residing in Milton Keynes in the UK, who tied the knot in 1941, more than 82 years ago. There's something particularly appealing that their name is Bond, coincidently only a couple of years behind them in longevity, there's another longtime love bond couple, Gene and Irene Bond of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Ron and Joyce Bond married in 1941 in Newport Pagnell …
….82 years on, aged 100 and 102 and still going, they are still happily together, now in a retirement home
What seems common to all of these couples, when interviewed, is they all hold onto something precious as well as simple. The Fishers explained that "We grew up together and were best friends before we married. A friend is for life; our marriage has lasted a lifetime." Both the Bond couples have said very similar things. Gene revealed “that you should always remember why you married that person", and all four repeat similar pieces of advice, about “give and take”, honesty and “being best friends”.
But though researching these impressively enduring, successful marriages, growing up without even realising so, I was lucky enough, all along, to have also seen a blueprint for it at home. Despite a plethora of other life problems through which they battled, my own parents celebrated more than 59 years of marriage, and knew each other longer than that, of course, in their early romance. They were best friends too, and from my perspective, key to their relationship success, was that they had all the same strengths as well as annoying, sometimes endearing faults. So they were never able to wind up the other to a critical point, soon realising they were both as bad, as well as good as each other. Initial arguments might boil up, but within a minute or two, break into mutually self-aware waves of laughter. They were two musicians who also taught, with a shared love of many things from music to books and mountain walking, an eccentric, mild-boggling mixture of creativity, extraordinary disorganisation and otherworldliness, but steadfast honesty and loyalty.
So perhaps songs about everlasting love won't just be declarations of how great it is, but also contain more nuance, holding hands through difficulty and struggle, as well as good times.
But enduring romantic love can be expressed from many perspectives and in other forms. The poet Philip Larkin had a series of meaningful relationships, but also expressed much twisted, but also sharply observed frustration about love in his work. Famously, in This Be The Verse, he tells us that:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Many of us might recognise that caustic observation. But Larkin had many emotional colours to his palette. In the less typical, but quietly powerful An Arundel Tomb, he is strangely, but not sentimentally moved by the detail of a cathedral's 14th-century tomb to the Count and Countess of Arundel, in which they are shown, in their armed finery, to hold hands:
Hands hold: 14th-century tomb of the Count and Countess of Arundel in Chichester Cathedral
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.
Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand …
… Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Enduring love need not be romantic in the conventional sense. Friendship is very much a key component in song suggestions. So that love might be from or for a parent, a child or a friend, or even an animal. In Larkin's poem, the detail is all, and that includes those of dogs at their feet. Perhaps this was mere convention in a heraldic tomb design. But in real life who can not be moved by the story of Greyfriars Bobby, the dog who was a best friend to Edinburgh policeman John Gray, who died of tuberculosis in 1858? Heartbroken, the dog apparently spent the next 14 years guarding the grave of his owner until he died in 1872. Different accounts vary on the actual owner of the dog, but there must have been enough truth in the behaviour of the faithful furry one to endure. Bobby is remembered with his stature, one that in its own way is its own memorial to tragic, canine everlasting love.
Fur faithful: albumen print thought to be of Greyfriars Bobby (1865) and his statue at the corner of Edinburgh's Candlemaker Row and George IV Bridge.
So then, let's open the floodgates of loving endurance in song form, and manning this moving topic on this special occasion, I'm delighted to welcome one of our longtime ongoing guest gurus and great regulars in this place, the marvellous magicman! Place your songs in comments below, for the deadline at 11pm UK time on Monday, for playlists published next week. Long may we continue.
Your love endures: RIP Burt Bacharach ( 12 May 1928 – 8 February 2023)
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