If you can't sing it, don't even try to say it.

It must be true that there is a song for every situation on earth, every awkward feeling, every heartstopping event. Certain songs you never get over, you always listen to it with specific feelings in your heart and that fine smile on your lips. Or you just switch the radio off for the unbearable ones.

When I got kicked in 1994, a friend of a friend made me sit down on a chair in his room and put on Roxette's "She's so vulnerable". I cried a lot that day. I can honestly say I have never heard that song anywhere in my life after that. And just as well. U2's Party Girl can take me pre-kick though. When we left South Africa, Toeks asked the Greenie and I to sit down and put on that beautiful "Time to say goodbye" of Andreas Botchelli and Sarah Brightman. Every time I hear it, I think of her and good times and the Kalahari. (In my head South Africa sometimes consists the Kalahari only.)

Several other songs have other meanings, Albert Hammond always makes me think of Stellenbosch and my time there, as does Unchained Melody (for all the drunk guys who used to sing it out loud and proud on their way back to their hostels from the various pubs and houseparties). Stellenbosch in the 1980's was a changed place, man.

Sometimes I hear Peace Train from Cat Stevens and I get teary. It was the unofficial/ official election song in 1994. And of course some other songs closely linked to SA - Weeping and Scatterlings of Africa. In New Plymouth that is how a SA braai was organised - the ad in the paper called for all the Scatterlings of Africa. Naturally we went.

When the Greenie and I met, we discovered that we both loved Sinead O'Connor's "Nothing compares to you". And we nearly had the neighbours mad with our loop-play of High by the Lighthouse Factory. Little did we know we'd be living the dream soon. My children love music. Both appear to have a liking for jazz, blues and reggae. The reggae bit I get (dey are from Aaafrica after all, maaan), but the jazz and blues are surprises. Inez was about 2 days old when she turned her head in between all the noise of the television to the advertisement for classical music. She still likes it.

I think there is a song for every mood, every nuance, every whimsical memory. Maybe Barry Manilow knew that all along, that's why he started writing the songs that ABBA could later thank him for.