Stand By Me Oasis Analysis

Song of The Week: "Stand by Me", by Oasis.

I'm not an Oasis fan by any measure, but this song brings memories back. In the fall of 1997 I was in Nantes, in Bretagne, France, for a course on food process technologies. One night I went to a restaurant by the Saint-Nazaire port and had a wonderful meal. When I finished I told the waitress how happy I was with it, and together with the bill she brought the cook - who also happened to be the restaurant owner.

He was an interesting guy. The first thing that impressed me was his young age. He appeared to be in his early 30s. That was remarkable - particularly in France, a country where being an entrepreneur is notoriously difficult, and where becoming a chef takes many, many years of hard training.

She lived near Manchester, and was studying to become a nurse. She loved her parents and hated her younger brothers. She had parachuted the previous summer, and it had been such a terrifying experience that she couldn’t wait to do it again. She used to like romantic comedies until the story of one of them proved to be remarkably similar to a hurtful break-up she experienced, but without the happy end. She had stopped going to movies, she regretted to inform me. Her hands were pretty, with fingers that were plump as her cheeks, and as pale as them. Her nails were delicately trimmed and her polish of choice, light green, made them look like dew dripping from branches. She didn’t move her hands to talk. I did. Oh, how much I loved her craftily assembled sentences and flawless grammar – even though her accent made me become aware of my own, and progressively that made more and more insecure, and concerned about saying anything that could be seen as foolish. The night went on, who knows for how long. Her name was Charlotte. The way she spoke it. Charlotte. I couldn’t hold myself and committed the peccadillo of asking her to repeat it. She gracefully obliged, and found funny that I liked the way she said it. “What’s that? It’s just…