A Life More Ordinary

Time, as has often been noted, is a peculiar beast and it feels like an opportune moment to take a brief detour from the main narrative and slip forwards in time from where we were and take a short hop back from where we are…confused? Yeah, it’s a bit like being in my head.

One of my main drivers in life is understanding people or being understood. I think that when I step out of the present, I tend to dwell among the streets of endless possibility, the decisions that we never took and the moments that were never ours to own. I think a lot about what has never been and the reasons behind that almost as much as I consider the choices I have actually made and the path that I have walked during my time on the surface of this world. Often, those thoughts revolve around relationships, from my own perspective and that of others. There have been times during my life when my desire to understand has led me to cross lines that I otherwise wouldn’t to try to feel how others feel and I try to explore this is my next few posts.

I have a very clear memory of seeing an interview with lyrical genius, Paul Heaton, where he discussed the topics that he covers in his music. He spoke of the different types of heartbreak and how, as a nation, we’re often obsessed about what relationships look like when you’re young and in love (to inadvertently quote the Flying Pickets song), comparing them to what people might go through when they are older and their worlds fall apart, opining that it’s essentially a different type of heartbreak that we tend not to analyse because the reality is almost too painful.

I think what he was getting at is that it’s easier to love and lose when you’re younger, when you still feel that naive immortality that comforts you almost subconsciously if your world falls apart. When you are in your fifties or sixties and you suddenly find yourself alone, perhaps through no fault of your own, it’s harder because you don’t feel that you have your best days ahead of you. The wrinkles and the tighter-fitting clothes, the emotional turmoil tells the story of your past and makes the days to come harder to find, let alone navigate.

That’s what I’ve tried to capture in ‘All Our Broken Yesterdays’ told from the perspective of a wife, a mother who has given everything that she had, forfeited all of those roads less travelled for a man who she thought was ‘the one’, only for her world to fall apart when ‘middle-aged’ sets in and her husband’s infidelity cheapens her entire existence. It’s like the scene from Love Actually, where Alan Rickman’s character’s deceit is revealed to Emma Thompson’s character and you can feel the pain of her whole world crumbling around her. It’s beautifully, tragically played and I can’t watch it without feeling incredibly uncomfortable. Perhaps because I think in that moment, I can understand how she feels. Maybe my own pain of my first, failed marriage has stayed with me, even though it happened when I was relatively young or perhaps it’s just a combination of that heartbreak and my past that have left me with…an ability to feel the pain of others in certain situations? I don’t know, my mind is probably off on one of its many brief sojourns as I try to make sense of my own existence! It happens. Anyway, here are the aforementioned lyrics, written in November 2024.

All Our Broken Yesterdays

You shouldn’t have said forever if she was waiting in the wings
Your voice like broken glass, just dressed up like blackbird sings

You shouldn’t have walked me home that night or listened to my heart
Your stories shone like diamonds, lured me in to play this part

You shouldn’t have set me dreaming about the people I could be
A multitude of futures yet I’m just a shade of me

Just like every other sad song that’s been penned
It takes you from initial spark to unexpected end
Turns smoothest skin to wrinkled and blondest hair to grey
And years of conversations into nothing left to say

Just like every other sad song that’s been wrote
It takes you swiftly sinking, where previously you’d float
Turns all your dream to nightmares and turns hope into despair
And years of welcome home to empty house with no-one there

You shouldn’t have said forever if you craved someone else’s kiss
Frightened off by middle-aged that was born from wedded bliss

The photos haven’t aged so well, just echoes lined with dust
Like all your empty promises that turned from gold to rust

Go find your young and pretty and your life that slipped away
While I pick up all the pieces of our broken yesterdays

Just like every other sad song that’s been sung
It takes you from the mountain tops to ladder’s bottom rung
Turns beautiful to ugly, years to come to ancient news
Leaves you stumbling down roads paved with gold, dressed up in clown’s shoes

And just like every other sad song that you’ve heard
You’ll listen to it on repeat, learning every word
Turns happily ever after into thirty wasted years
Sat among our broken yesterdays with broken hopes and tears.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.