I’ve been behind on everything, because well, everything: Christmas, Dutch classes, learning about Dutch values classes (!) and well, writing. Anyway, this is a story from last month: I was reading Vulture one afternoon and then I ended up clicking on this interview with Robert Plant, and there was a question about Heart's cover of Stairway to Heaven.

Which — I am horrified to admit — I had no clue about. Where was I in 2012?! This cover is so beautiful that for a day or so I listened to it on repeat, and each time I felt incredibly transported, in the way that I hadn’t in a long time, and in a way that is hard to describe because for a good period of my younger life I could not listen to enough Led Zeppelin. Watching the video — and Plant and Jimmy Page’s reaction — I felt a a lot of things: nostalgia, sadness, awe, and this sense of deep connection with a piece of music that I hadn’t felt in a while, but almost as if I had discovered something that was missing, the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. How easy is it to forget the things we were once obsessed with, that took up so much of our time?

Listening to this, I felt something I can’t quite describe. A bizarre sensation of something akin to muscle memory, as if suddenly my mind was remembering what it was like to hear this song. When Plant says in the interview

“Look at the company I was keeping that night. Who was I sitting next to? What was going on? I didn’t even know the people anymore. How did we move across from being a British blues band to this ridiculous achievement? Well, ridiculous is a multifarious term. We all stood back at the end of the sessions, reeling from the transitions throughout the song. But “Stairway to Heaven” has its own life. Later I often felt estranged. It began intimate and vulnerable and sincere, and then the years carried on. It was no longer ours and neither should it be. Now it’s out there driving people to distraction and then maybe driving a hard bargain.

I’ve left so much of it all behind. And that night I was watching a reenactment — clever, well intentioned, and respectful. I was in the gallery peering and following an excellent display. Me and my contribution to it all were hung out to dry in the land of timeless tributes, so far from the cover and the scene, and so far from the home that we’ve given it.”

I thought: where was I all those years ago? Where have all the years gone? When did I go from this to that to this? I was young and I heard this song and my life seems so different now, and I am so different and yet it is still possible to hear this song and feel something, to remember the past in a way that you thought it was no longer possible to, to still feel awed by something that has become old and that you sometimes forget was a part of who you were, to not think of the past as a part of your life that you’ve boxed away and compartmentalised, but as something to remember with something approaching fondness, even to feel happy about? How utterly strange. Anyway, please do what I did: watch the video, listen to the cover, listen to the original, and then repeat this a dozen more times.