Today I was serenaded by a stranger.

Sounds terribly romantic doesn’t it. It would have been perfect had it not been a stranger, rather the love of my life, unfortunately though he is all the way back in Australia though, so alas, a stranger it was.

I don’t think I’ve ever been serenaded before. It was, as you can well imagine, rather perplexing and embarrassing.

The owner of the cafe where I worked had a had arranged a small BBQ of friends and colleagues out the back of the cafe. There came a group of people, with different backgrounds and stories, some from the US, some Germans.

At sometime during the party one of them pulled out a guitar and started to play and to sing. Of course I thought this was fantastic! Living in the fairy tale world that I do spontaneous singing and music are perfect.

A little while after he began I popped my head out of the cafe and started throwing requests into the mix. I started with James Taylors ‘Fire and Rain’ guessing that he was probably older than my father and that this would be about the right time in musical history. Well, he had a go, he got it all a bit mixed up, missed half the song and the notes. But he tried. Then I went back in. Then every time I stuck my head out, someone would ask me what my next request was, so I pulled some other things out of my head that I thought were around the ‘dad’s music’ time that this man might know and was sadly disappointed. I think they managed a beatles song, but the rest of it was some US country ballads I’ve never heard of.  One of my requests had been Deep Purple, to which I was told ‘he’s no hard rocker’ and then from the guitarist came something to the effect of ‘for the beautiful girl I’ll try anything’ or some such rubbish.

Anywho, I kept going about the general cafe business, sometimes listening out if there was any decent music coming from the back, there mostly wasn’t. Then at some stage when I’d quite forgotten them out there, the other owner of the cafe came in and said ‘I think he’s singing for you now’ so I stuck my head out the back door of the cafe and sure enough the whole 10 or so people gathered were all staring at me and the man was standing with his guitar and singing with great feeling:
 
‘I love you so and that is why
whenever I want you
all I have to do is dream
dream dream dream
Dream dream dream dream
dream dream dream dream ‘
 
By the Everly brothers. Thank goodness I only got that bit of the text! I’ve since looked at the lyrics and, if he had this time known them all, that would have been so entirely inappropriate! Goodness it was embarrassing! But there he went and serenaded me with such dedication so that all I could do was try desperately not to go too red! Laugh and sing along where I could, and then at the end applaude. With all of them staring at me the whole time. 

At the end of the day I discovered that as well as BBQ’ing (or grilling as it’s called here) they’d all been into the booze, which I hope explains it. Before leaving the man with the guitar came and thanked me for letting him sing to me. Clearly he enjoyed himself.

So that is that, my little fractured fairytale.

I wonder what will happen tomorrow.

Much love to all

Amanda