Burt, Butch and Bolvian Bankrobbing

I’ve loved listening to Burt Bacharach ever since I first saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I love that scene where Butch turns up at Katharine Ross’s place and takes her for a ride a bike to BJ Thomas’s version of Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.  By the way, as an adolescent, the thing that impressed me most about Virginia Haworth was her ability to recite the whole of the Bolivian bank robbing scene without having learnt any Spanish at school..

There is much of the Bacharach/David substantial back catalogue, that I absolutely adore and during my first spell of depression I would spend a great deal of time listening to Burt Bacharach’s Greatest Hits.  On that album there are songs that lend themselves perfectly to feelings of sadness and melancholia.  However there was one song that I couldn’t bear listening to.  I would always skip track 9, Jimmy Radcliffe’s version of There Goes a Forgotten Man.  It’s not a bad song, but I couldn’t bear listening to it because it resonated so much with the way I felt.

http://bacharachonline.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=1

I never was Jennie’s guy and a stranger didn’t come along one night and steal my love away.  However, I did feel that I was walking alone, I did believe that former friends would turn away when I passed by and I did suppose that they were pitying me. 

I no longer feel angry about this.  To a certain extent I can understand why people wouldn’t invite me social events, why phone calls that were made after months of silence were ignored or why people would make excuses before dashing away following a chance encounter in the supermarket.  I accept that people don’t want to spend a great deal of time with someone who is sad, bitter, self pitying and often drunk.  Partly as a consequence of this I would spend too much of my time in the company of others who were sad, bitter, self pitying and often drunk.  I do recognise that there were many people who did offer me friendship and support and I spurned that because I struggled to acknowledge that I was depressed.

Often, one of the consequences of depression is that it does result in social isolation.  I suspect it is more difficult to bounce back from depression when you feel alone and you struggle to establish and maintain friendships.  My circumstances in relation to social isolation are not completely desperate, in that there are a number of people who have been wonderful in terms of the love and support they have offered. 

There are occasions when I feel incredibly sad but I don’t feel bitter, I can easily snap out of feelings of self pity and I struggle to recall the last time I was drunk