Finding My Ordinary World

Perfection. There's no such thing.

But what if I have proof?

Entirely subjective proof, of course. But proof nonetheless.

It's been a while since I've talked about music here on FYRTEK. I've spent much of the past year in a state of mental healing, and one of the things affected along the way has been my love for music.

It's quite something when something that has been such a huge part of your life suddenly stops giving you the feeling it once did.

But I digress.

The subject of this post is Duran Duran's Ordinary World, a song that is very special to me and belongs to a very exclusive club I've come to think of as my Songs of Perfection.

From the moment I first heard it to today, nearly 35 years later, it remains a song I can completely lose myself in.

I'm not going to analyse the song itself too deeply. That's another article entirely. Instead, I want to try to remember where this song fitted into my life, and how, in its own quiet way, it has helped me along the way.

I can't remember exactly when or where I first heard it.

But I remember my reaction.

I must have been ten or eleven years old when I caught the opening notes, and they made me stop whatever I was doing. Then the song pushed forward into its chorus, and, perhaps for the first time, I experienced what it felt like for an emotional high to somehow climb even higher.

Looking back, music probably played a much bigger role in my childhood than I understood at the time.

Around this period of my life, I was exposed to adults abusing drugs. It was an awful thing for any child to witness, but it also taught me something early. Music became somewhere else I could go. And thinking about it now, I genuinely believe it helped keep me away from some of the darker roads I could have followed.

There was, however, a problem after hearing Ordinary World for the first time.

I had absolutely no idea who sang it.

And I had no idea how I was ever going to hear it again.

That's difficult to imagine now. We live with smartphones that can identify a song within seconds and give us immediate access to almost everything ever recorded.

But this was the early 1990s.

A song could simply disappear.

And this one did.

I think it was at least another year before I finally encountered it again.

I was watching MTV when the video appeared. The moment I recognised the song, I found myself staring at the television.

Completely transfixed.

I remember being slightly annoyed that I had to blink because, for that fraction of a second, I wasn't seeing the video.

The video was beautiful.

More than that, it somehow completed the song for me. I didn't realise it at the time, but Ordinary World would become one of those pieces of music that helped shape my taste in everything that followed.

Naturally, MTV also managed to annoy me.

Back then they had a habit of cutting off the final few seconds of songs to squeeze in a commercial break or move on to the next video.

They did exactly that.

For the next few years, Ordinary World existed mostly as something I occasionally encountered. It would appear on the radio or MTV, stay with me for a few minutes, and then disappear again.

It wasn't until I owned my first PC and eventually connected to the internet, through the screeching technological ritual that was dial-up, that I finally managed to get a copy of the song for myself.

And then it couldn't disappear anymore.

Fast forward to 2026.

It's Sunday. Next week is September. Summer is coming to an end, and here in London we're preparing ourselves for another wet autumn.

Part of me wishes life were easier now than it was when I first heard Ordinary World.

In many ways, it is.

But life doesn't really run out of challenges. It just changes them.

I'm now a father to two awesome humans with autism. I try my best to help them and prepare them for a world that isn't always particularly kind or accommodating towards people who experience it differently.

And that scares me.

I dream a lot, although I forget probably 99% of those dreams.

What often survives is the emotion.

A strange residue that stays behind after everything else has disappeared.

The handful of dreams I do remember tend to be the ones that hit too hard.

One of them was about my daughter.

She was grown up and struggling with something, and somehow I wasn't there for her.

Even though it was only a dream, writing that sentence still hurts.

Some dreams disappear when you wake up.

Others leave scars.

This probably sounds like I've wandered away from Duran Duran entirely, but this is where it all comes back together.

Ordinary World isn't perfect to me simply because it is beautifully written or performed.

It's perfect because it has somehow followed me through my life.

If my life were an album, this would be one of its tracks.

A song discovered by a child who didn't really understand why it affected him so deeply, carried forward through adolescence, adulthood, parenthood and everything in between.

And today, when I hear the words:

"But I won't cry for yesterday..."

I understand them differently than I did when I was ten.

The ordinary world isn't somewhere you eventually arrive.

Perhaps it's something you spend your whole life trying to find.

And somewhere along the way, you learn how to survive.

I have.