Peaceful easy purchase

In 1979 I was at boarding school in rural Scotland Mallory Towers it was not. Our year group had a weekend-only common room, with a radiogram installed in one corner, fresh from a farm sale. On this venerable machine we would endeavour to play our precious vinyl discs. And we danced! Anyone remember knock on wood? When I hear the opening chords of that song, I still see swirling gypsy skirts, wedges, and I smell sunlight on wooden floors. Far away the dinner bell rings unheeded...

And then Eileen M brought in her Eagles album. This very one. Rebels that we we were, entirely without the words to articulate our cause, we would place the stylus reverently on the third track of the second side, climb on top of a tall cupboard that housed maths books, and sway in harmony to the lyrics of 'Take it to the limit'. That WAS our limit. How we did not break the cupboard with our combined weight of, say eighty stone (ten girls at eight stone) is beyond my comprehension. Perhaps the class that followed us broke it.

The girls that really DID take it to the limit by, say, skipping Sunday mass, setting fire to the dormitory, or keeping a secret kitten in the sleeping area known as The Vatican, tended to get expelled. The rest of us rumbled along, getting more and more hormonal and frustrated as the years passed. Only one of us ever became a nun, and she was not in our disco-country class. We were destined for lives far more ordinary

That July, I found a contraband magazine, Blue Jeans, and entered a crossword competition. My mother supplied the Tipp-Ex when I made a mistake, and she posted off the completed form. Weeks later, I received a cheque for the sum of five pounds, my prize winnings. My mother took the cheque to her Royal Bank in Oban, because I was fifteen and did not have my own account. What would I have put in it?

From there, it was easy. I went straight to John Menzies, upstairs to the record department, and handed over the whole fiver in exchange for this Eagles album. After that, I took it home, and my sister TML and I listened to it all summer whilst customising our own Blue Jeans on the black and gold Singer sewing machine. ' Already gone' is the track I most associate with the smell of tailor's chalk and the uncomfortable sensation of pins jabbing into my thighs.

And now, my friends, it's 2016, and Glenn Frey founder of the Eagles, has died. My inheritance track is neither of the above-mentioned Eagles songs, but Lyin' Eyes, because it's in pure ballad form, with great guitar work, it's six and a half minutes long, and I know all the words.

Even then, before my first relationship, my mother had already taught me about the main, the loss, of infidelity and unrequited love, purely by sighing heavily and making pointed remarks during Top of the Pops. How could this Love Ever be Love?

And now it's still 2016, Glenn Frey is still dead, I still enjoy listening to ballads. I am, however, pleased to report that my mother's Ship of Love finally came in. Last autumn, she remarried her sweetheart of almost forty years.