Temporary Secretary

Travelling the streets of South London this weekend, ferrying furniture in a tanklike Peugeot estate... And I heard a competition on the radio.

They were staging a two-way run-off for the best Paul McCartney (solo) song ever. A head-to-head between Live & Let Die - unutterably brilliant and probably the greatest James Bond title song ever (this does not include the original Monty-Norman-Orchestra-though-almost-certainly-John-Barry Dr No title song which then went on to be the running theme to the series, and also my life, and doesn't count) - and a little-known Macca nugget from the early eighties called Temporary Secretary. So, I immediately call my brother and tell him to listen to XFM and then hang up.

And after the commercial break - Temporary Secretary wins, as I hoped it would, and when it played it was like taking a bite of a sonic Proustian madeleine. You see, when I was but a small one, in that lost continent where the Soviet Union existed, a carbonated soda stream was the height of style and a Big Mac was but a rare exotic treat, my brother and I spent an entire holiday playing this song relentlessly - on an 8-track cassette I do believe. And yes, that's true, not period propping.

With its bizarre-at-the-time-but-now-strangely-fashionable repetetive beats, vocoder harmonising and inane, nonsensical, hypnotically relentless chorus of "temp-orary sec-retary" repeated forever it was.... A perfect children's song. We chanted it at at each other, at our parents, at the television, at the sky, at each other again for an entire Christmas holiday (or was it Spring? I remember it quite wintry, but I dunno) and sent ourselves and everyone around us completely beserk.

And after that, I never heard the song again.

Until Sunday when those strange sensations of nostalgia and memory flooded through me. My brother immediately called back - he was hearing the song for the first time in years as well and almost fell off his bike. And then he went and got the song and sent it today and I started playing it... and playing it... and playing it. And once more that mindless metronomic beat invaded my mind, making me chant 'Temp-orary Sec-retary' again and again and again to myself, the TV, the sky, myself. More than twenty years apart, I was responding to this song exactly as I left it. And so, I started to ruminate - understand this: the octopus is the most metaphysical of inverterbrates - and here is what I thought:

No matter where we go in life, somehow we always find ourselves at the beginning again.

Greatly satisfied by such a poetic, philosophic - and yet also ethereal - mid-afternoon rumination I girded myself for another to take shape. An aphorism, an epigram, a de la Rochefoucaultian bon mot possibly more resonant and meaningful than the last was slowly shaping in my mind. Swelling into form, articulation, cogitation. Taking over the synapses, converting from pure neurone to bio-electrical signal, to spoken word. And it was:

Temp-orary sec-retary.