Two Wyrd Sisters

When we were very small, both under five, my sister and fellow Spacedog Sarah and I saw a wonderful thing.     We lived in a council flat at the time with a balcony and on the railing was balanced a peacock.  Its sumptuous tail trailed over the side of the rail and it cocked its tiny head,  jewelled eyes glinting in the sunlight.    Well, at least that's what we think we saw and yet it seems so unlikely.  The strange thing is this memory, even if imagined, is exactly the same for both of us.  We describe seeing the same thing, whether we did or not.

For me it's this shared memory and history that defines siblinghood and in our case sisterhood.    Sisterhood is something that seems to fascinate people, something we've discovered as we've worked together as Spacedog.  People are intrigued by the closeness, the way we only need say a few words to one another to communicate quite complex ideas, the way we're tuned into one another's signals.  Some mistake this for our being lovers and imagine it's erotically charged! But mostly people are fascinated by the idea of 'wyrd sisters' working together to create other worldly - our world - music, steeped in common background, culture and psychological landscape.

So far, so romantic.  Yet siblings bicker, siblings fight, siblings can be rivals, siblings move away from one another.    Certainly as I was growing up, the older sister, I felt a little resentful of the fact that Sarah was so much cleverer than me.   Her facility with maths left me standing in a dyscalculic daze.  It was as if, unfairly,  she had been given all the ability and me none.  As we grew up I realised that actually it doesn't matter, that we all have something to give. So I'm happy to pop up the shops to get the tights and haunt the sweaty aisles of Maplins, while Sarah does something technical I can't fathom. 

It's true, we are not the little girls in matching nighties we were once.    Time doesn't stand still and your viewpoint changes, you become more rational about some things and gain insight into others.  But you never forget the things that went bump in the night, the things that delighted you both, the things that made your hair stand on end or your body shake with laughter.

And yes,when we stand on the stage and work together there does feel like there's some sort of nebulous, powerful magic of sisterhood there.   It's as if that peacock is still on the balcony, binding us together in a genetically determined imaginative experience.  What is is I don't know and whatever I do say sounds irrational. 

Perhaps it's better we never know if the peacock was really there.