‘We’re heading for Vee-nus (Vee-nus) and still we stand tall ...’
Those of a certain age will certainly remember this iconic ‘80s hair metal track and if you’re not familiar, check it out here and prepare to be vastly entertained. The blond teased and permed hair! The black leather pants! The white tuxedo jacket! The pink lip-gloss pout! ‘The Final Countdown’ was definitely released at a moment before irony infected everything.
Back in 1986, when the Cold War was still the dominant global apocalyptic trope, Swedish band Europe released this song with its annoyingly catchy keyboard riff. It’s particularly annoying because, everytime I hear it, it reminds me of an impulse buy I made age 11 that left me feeling like I’d made the wrong choice.
I had been saving up my pocket money for weeks, if not months, to buy Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet on cassette. Living on a Prayer! You Give Love a Bad Name! Wanted Dead or Alive! Kids loved the ‘Jovi back in ’86. Every week, my savings growing steadily, I went into Woolworths (latterly Deka) on the main drag of Papakura, where we lived at the time, to check that there were indeed copies of the tape still there.
Then the fateful day arrived: I had saved up the $11.99 required to get my very own copy. Back to Woolworths I went and down I took a copy of that long-desired tape. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joey Tempest and his gang looking like they were about to depart planet Earth any second and heard those distinctive keyboard notes in my head. ‘Hmm,’ I thought, putting down the minimal black and red Bon Jovi cassette, and picking up this promise of intergalactic travel, ‘maybe I should get this instead?’ Temporarily possessed by an immovable earworm and a sense of novelty, I ended up leaving the store with The Final Countdown in my red and white Woolworths bag, instead of the tape for which I went in.
Aside from the of course brilliant title track, it wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t Bon Jovi. I tried to like it a lot, but it always felt like a bit of an effort. To really rub it in, my younger brother, who had not saved up his pocket money (and had therefore not really 'earned' it), got Slippery When Wet for Christmas that year and gleefully took every opportunity to tell me how superior it was compared to The Final Countdown.
Anyway, this trip down memory lane is really apropos of nothing, other than that I am on the final countdown (see what I did there?) to having this baby. And also, like last time, watching a lot of nostalgic clips of this and that on YouTube to pass the time until we get there.
And this time, unless I go into early labour in the next couple of days, there is a definitive date to which to finally countdown: Thursday 26 September. Following on from my last post, I have indeed made the decision to have an elective caesarean. I’m feeling a little apprehensive about it, especially as it gets closer, but the relief I felt once I had made the decision and told my midwife and the doctor suggests to me that I’ve made the right call (unlike I did in front of that long ago Woolworths’ shelf).
I want to thank everyone who sent me messages based on my last post for their kind and supportive words: thank you for sharing your experiences, both the positive and the not-so-positive, and your advice. It really helped me focus on this decision and make up my mind about what to do.
So this is ‘au revoir’ for now. I’m not sure when I’ll be posting again as I’m also anticipating a fog of newborn baby-ness after the hospital stay is over, but I hope to be back online before the end of the year.
Perhaps 'The Final Countdown' is a more apposite choice for this post than I at first realised: I’ll leave you with these poignant words from Monsieur Tempest and co (well, poignant if you try and ignore the accompanying perms and the pouts):
'We're leaving together
But still it's farewell
And maybe we'll come back,
To earth, who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame
We're leaving ground (leaving ground)
Will things ever be the same again?
It's the final countdown.'
