Recently on going through some videos in my collection I stumbled upon Keith Terry’s Body Music DVDs. I had come across Keith with Caitlin in 2010 at the Woodford Folk Music Festival, and I have wonderful memories of the time Caitlin and I spent together learning some of Keith’s rhythmic patterns and performing them with each other – they work really well as a duet. It is a personal recollection and will mean little to most other people, but for me it is very special, and whenever I see people slapping rhythmic patterns on their arms, chest, tummy and thighs I will think of that time with her.
We would like this website to recognise the person that Caitlin was, and for it also to celebrate the wonder and beauty of life that you might have experienced with her. If you’d like to relate an experience that you shared with her that resonates with you, please send it to us, and over time we’ll put them up here for others to enjoy. She was a very special person and we would like everyone, even those who never met her, to share some of that. If this web site becomes a place of joy and celebration of life then it will say even more about her than we could ever hope to have done with our personal reflections.
To contact us regarding Caitlin's site, please use this email.
Amongst Caitlin's diaries was a copy of an email that I had sent her after she won her second Eisteddfod in 2008. The first win, a day or so earlier, was for classical vocal and this one was for jazz vocal. She had only had singing lessons for one year, entered the Eisteddfod at the end of that year, had these wins and didn't sing again. This was typical of her. She found things / pursuits - academic, sporting and artistic (music, art, writing, theatre and dance) quite easy, but little held her interest for more than a year or two.
Hi Caitlin,
Another win!
Congrats on your huge success.
It just show what hard work combined with natural talent can bring.
But you deserved to become a winner after some notable achievements in the past (which haven’t given you the reward you deserved).
I hope you are being very humble and not bragging. It is hard I know because you want to share it with people before the moment fades.
Anyway enjoy - you will have a lot more wins, and there will be seconds and fourths and probably even lasts - it seems there is just as many losing moments as winning in life.
Enjoy the good and roll over and get back up after the bad. As they say, a winner is someone who has gained from their losses.
We’re proud of you!
Dad 17.9.08
The following aren't Caitlin's words. It is a poem by Sylvia Plath that she loved.
I Am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring. Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them –
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me