The other evening I had a bit of a Proustian moment. In A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, the narrator eats a Madeleine cake, and his whole childhood flashes before him, leading to page after page of beautifully written but mind-numbingly tedious prose.
My girlfriend had been to Middle Farm, and cooked for us two lamb chops, which she had bought for the highly surprising price of £7.80. “Do you want mint sauce?” she said, and the opening theme music for Crown Court, the daytime TV series from the 70s, popped into my head. Weird, that.
The chops were lovely, but the music had affected my mood. I used to watch Crown Court when I was ill, at home, and not at school. They used a studio audience as the jury, an early form of reality TV, and professional actors as the lawyers and accused. I always watched it with a certain feeling of guilt: that I should be somewhere else. I guess I also must have also felt pretty lousy in the first place. I hadn’t heard or thought of the music since.
The next day at work I hummed the refrain: a strident trumpet solo, to a work colleague. He didn’t remember Crown Court: he somehow, though, despite the rudimentary nature of my impression, identified the composer who had written it, Leoš Janáček.
A phone call to his wife, in which he described rather than hummed the music, produced the name of the piece it had come from: Sinfonietta. I searched it out on You Tube, and he was right. It’s 1’40” into this track
Was it the lamb chops that made me recall the tune? The mint sauce? A particular mood I was in?
“Maybe you were feeling ill,” said the same colleague. “Or guilty about something.” Funnily enough, an hour after eating, I was ill. The chops, in effect, went straight through me. Or maybe it was the sauce, well past its sell-by date.