Sentimental

There is, in me, an indomitable streak of sentimentality,
and it looks as though I’m stuck with it for life. Of course
I try to control it, lest it disgrace me in public, but I know
it’s there, just waiting to be triggered by a lachrymose
scene in a film or a soppy piece of music. I’ve undergone
surgical procedures for its removal but it’s too deep-
seated for total eradication. It has its provenance, I think,
in my dreamy youth, when, unable to express adequate
or appropriate emotion—or any emotion at all—in real
life, I experienced it gratuitously through books and films
and music. And, naturally, the more removed they were
from reality, the better. I became a sucker for the syrupy,
and dreamt great dreams made out of this goo. You know
—love, romance, undiluted happiness, constructive
engagement with life. The usual suspects. I now allow
myself to believe that I've acquired at least the makings of
a desentimentalized literary taste, and as for film, there's
some evidence that I could no longer watch South Pacific
without flinching; but music can do still utterly undo me.
I remember, in the 80s, confessing to my Listener
colleague Gordon Campbell that in the mid-to-late 1950s,
a crucially formative time for the first wave of baby-
boomers, I’d been more into Pat Boone than Elvis Presley,
let alone Little Richard. A pale cast seemed to cloud his
gaze as he silently registered this information; I knew then
how irredeemably middle-of-the-road I was. At least I
refrained from sharing my liking for Chris de Burgh's
'Lady in Red' or indeed Engelbert's 'Les Bicyclettes de
Belsize.' So we wallow on, we sentimentalists, ever ready to
melt when a heartstring is plucked, however commonplace
the cause. Inscribed on our (slightly damp) banner are
Noel Coward's words 'Strange how potent cheap music is.'