Where Do You Go To, My Lovely!

Found this on youtube. Once upon a time, I thought it the most beautiful song ever written.  However, hearing it again after all these years, it brought back the strange memory of the first time I heard it.




I was maybe 9 or 10 years old and at boarding school in Australia, at the nastiest place imaginable.  I won't tell you the name but if Dickens ever wrote a novel about a convent school in the mountains, it would be this place.

It wasn't just that the nuns were all insane, but that they were all so DIFFERENTLY insane.  Honestly, apart from Sister Rosalie - a local girl with a genuine vocation and elderly parents just down the way that she couldn't leave - you could do a study of an entire range of mental illnesses just from this bunch.  I could tell you dozens of savagely horrible stories about that horrendous year stuck in Looney-World, until mum and dad finally believed what we were telling them - and it was all so off-the-wall it was indeed hard to believe - and got us out of there!, but I won't.

But I have, I must let you know, told "Broken Rites", the Australian organisation investigating abuses in various religious organisations, about a lot of went on that year, because, seriously, it was that bad. And, hey, what was really cute about doing that report was discovering 19 other people had previously given them reports about that school and a number of those people were old friends I'd lost contact with over the years.

But I will tell you about this one memory:

There I was, in town, racing frantically past the pub trying not to be hit by the flying sperm ...

... OK, you obviously need a bit of backstory here:  Mother Madelaine!  Head of the school and convent, she was this tall, lean, elegant, patrician-looking woman (think Maggie Smith) and presented  as wonderful, charming and learned and you really liked her until you discovered ... she had this thing about SPERM!  It was everywhere, you see.  Sperm was everywhere. It crawled out of walls and dripped from tables and you had to constantly wash your hands to escape from it because it was omnipresent and out to get you  and she never let men stand within six feet of her because that's how far it leapt and if you ever had to sit next to a man, you had to sit on TWO Sydney phone books and carry three on your lap because that was the only way to stop their disgusting sperm from creeping inside you.

And pubs!  Mother Madelaine particularly hated pubs! Pubs were full of sperm flying wildly around, like scud missiles searching for a target.  And so, if you ever went into town, when it came to passing the pub ... run, girl, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

So there I was that day, alone and walking into town to buy stationery, when I came to the pub.  Terrifying!  So naturally I began racing frantically past the building trying not to be hit by flying sperm ...

... but coming from that pub was the most amazing song I had ever heard.  "Where do you go to, my lovely, when you're alone in your bed." It stopped me in my tracks and, sperm be damned, hellfire and eternal damnation be damned, I wanted to hear it.

So I stopped and listened and - apart from "What does that mean?  "You slip your nipples in brandy and never get your lips wet?"  Can you actually drink through your nipples?" - it blew me away; probably the most elegant and sophisticated song I had ever heard; opening a door into a world of unimagined delights.  I instantly decided that was the future I wanted, studying at the Sorbonne and owning racehorses and stealing art from Picasso and drinking through my nipples.

But it never happened, did it!  That future I wanted for myself, chosen that day while being bombarded by flying sperm outside that old red brick pub in a small Australian town!  Still, the future I did have turned out to be most pleasant indeed.

There is more to this story.  Much, much more.  "Paul is dead" and getting attacked by a flock of geese! Lots of random things that all add up to a very memorable day. However, I'm only telling you about this song and the very first time I heard it.