Josna Rege

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663. Toots and the Maytals. . .

In Britain, culture, Inter/Transnational, memories, Music, people, singing, Stories on June 1, 2026 at 9:35 pm


. . .without Toots or the Maytals. 

While in London this summer Andrew and I have been looking out for the chance to hear bands we might be familiar with; but to be honest, there haven’t been many whose names we even recognize. Just across the road from where we’re staying is the home base of the duo, The Paisley Daze, whom we wouldn’t even have known was a band except that on occasional sunny weekends they have been coming out on their balcony and giving an impromptu performance to anyone who cares to gather on the grassy bank across the street. Later this month we have tickets to hear Pauline Black, leader of the 2-Tone band The Selecter, perform in Margate with original Selecter drummer Charlie ‘H’ Bembridge. We also hope to act on our musician friend Marcia Mello’s advice and take in an open mic night at the Kilburn Arms. But the first show we managed to catch was “Toots and the Maytals Featuring Leba Hibbert” at the Electric Ballroom in Camden Town. 

Now, any of you who are fans will know that, sadly, Frederick Nathaniel ‘Toots’ Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals, that gentle giant of reggae music, was taken from us by Covid back in 2020. Andrew and I got out and played our old vinyl LPs, remembering the many, many times we had sung our way through them over the years, and the two times we had been able to see Toots perform live, most memorably in the late 1970s, when we had the honor of accompanying our late friend Eugene ‘Geno’ Williams to interview him after a show in Harvard Square. So when, even before leaving for London, we came upon the announcement that Toots’ daughter Leba would be in the UK on a Reggae Got Soul Tour, in honor of her father and the 50th anniversary of the release of the album of the same name, we didn’t think twice. 

It turned out that the Electric Ballroom is a storied venue just a short bus ride away from where we have been staying. My cousin Sue warned us to look out for pickpockets and for trip risks on their uneven floors. Looking up the place ahead of time I learned that it was an open floor plan with very few seats we resolved to arrive early so as to be able to grab one of them. Our days of getting as close to the stage as possible and being squashed and pummeled by a wall-to-wall crowd are over. (To be honest, we had never been into that scene.) 

We did get there early and were one of the first few people to get in. We did find a terrific place to sit and stand, in the front and center of the only balcony, overlooking but a little set back from the stage. Robin Catto, a well-known reggae DJ, warmed up the crowd with old favorites, followed by a warm-up band who were just all right. Finally, the top-billed band came onto the stage with a great deal of fanfare, well-deserved but solely on the strength of the lead singer’s relationship to the dear departed singer. She herself was still an unknown. The happy, nostalgic crowd, at least half of them old-timers like us, was willing to cut her all the slack she needed, as long as she and the band performed enough of her father’s hits. And that she did.

“Toots and the Maytals Featuring Leba Hibbert,” Electric Ballroom, 13 May 2026

I thought I had written them all down but can’t find the scrap of paper. Thankfully I found a playlist from another performance on the same tour. Here are the ones I knew, though they were interspersed with a few of Leba Hibbert’s own songs, which I’m afraid pretty much passed me by.  

Six and Seven Books
Never Grow Old
Pressure Drop
Time Tough
Sweet and Dandy
Love is Gonna let Me Down
Reggae Got Soul
Bam Bam
Funky Kingston
You’ve Got A Friend (sung by Leba Hibbert with her father toward the end of his life)
Take Me Home, Country Roads
Louie Louie
54-46 Was My Number
And for the encore:
No More War (this recording from a performance on the 2026 tour)
Monkey Man

(Did they sing “True Love is Hard to Find”? I’m not sure, but just in case, here it is.)

What did I love about the concert? Being at a performance in which more than half of the audience clearly knew the songs and readily sang along, as did I. Seeing the mix of old-timers and curious younger people drawn by the legendary name, Toots and the Maytals. And of course, there was the nostalgia of revisiting the music of our twenties in the city of my birth, where reggae had always had a huge following, where it had been mainstream, not just a niche genre. 

What did I not love as much? Well, despite being his daughter and singing his songs with a good band that included veteran reggae musicians, Leba Hibbert was not her father. The rich, fluid quality of his voice is unmatched and unmatchable. In my opinion the songs were rushed, both in their tempo and in the arc of each one, where it seemed to default too soon to exciting the crowd into a crescendo, chanting key words over and over again and ending with a burst of drumbeats. Sometimes this was fun, but it didn’t allow for the slower numbers to simmer and, in at least one case, it was at odds with both the mood and message of the original. “Time Tough” is about the unaffordable cost of living as it gets higher and higher—something that is still relevant and resonant with a contemporary audience, as in the chorus: 

Time Tough (Time Tough)
Everything is out of sight, so hard
(So hard) so hard (so hard)
Time Tough (Time Tough)
Everything is going higher and higher
(Higher and higher)

Instead, Leba Hibbert attempted to whip the crowd into a frenzy, inciting them to chant “higher and higher” in a completely different sense. It just didn’t feel right.

But let me return to what I loved and the nostalgia factor I mentioned earlier. Two of the songs moved me to tears as I sang along. First, the wedding song, “Sweet and Dandy,” one of two of Toots and the Maytals’ numbers in the soundtrack of the reggae blockbuster movie, The Harder They Come (starring the late great Jimmy Cliff). It had been a favorite of my mother, ever the incurable romantic, and I could just hear her singing with me. The other was “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Toots and the Maytals’ cover of the John Denver song that I firmly believe is better than the original. 

Almost heaven, West Jamaica. . . 

A group of us lived on a farm out in North Central Massachusetts when our children were small, and Maile, our friends’ Mark and Ruth’s daughter, chose this song to walk with her parents on either side of her down the “aisle” of a newly mown field outside her childhood home on her wedding day. Listening to that song brought a whole era of my life back to me, one that now seems so far from me as to be irretrievable. Here too I found myself weeping as I sang along with the crowd to a song that has meant so much to me. 

We had a terrific time that evening, and I’m very glad that Andrew and I were able to pay tribute to a singer and a band that we have loved and listened to over so many decades. But of course, however good Leba Hibbert and her band and back-up singers were, they could never have measured up. How could they have? After all, they were Toots and the Maytals. . . without Toots or the Maytals. 

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662. Jan Morris and the Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond

In Books, Britain, culture, Inter/Transnational, Nature, people, places, Stories, women & gender on May 24, 2026 at 5:01 am


Andrew and I have been in the U.K. for nearly three weeks, mostly in North London, with a magical five-day trip to North Wales where it was cold, rainy, and windswept. Back in London the city is undergoing a heatwave and I’m feverish in bed with a summer cold. It’s miserable, because I am itching to be out walking, but it’s also making me slow down and reflect on our trip so far.

On Day 3 we set out for a walk over Hampstead Heath—one of my very favorite places in the whole world—with no particular destination in mind, soon passing the Dog Pond, the Highgate Men’s Bathing Pond, and the Kenwood Ladies’ Bathing Pond. (There is also a mixed bathing pond.) In early May it was far too cold for me to contemplate swimming there, but I may yet be able to screw up the courage to do so. I found myself taking a photo of the signs on the gate. One read: “Women Only. Men not allowed beyond this point.” The other was longer, and I only read the first sentence at the time: ”Those who identify as women are welcome to swim at the Kenwood Ladies Bathing Pond.” I thought to myself, Well said, Hampstead Heath. Clear and sensible.

Since then I have learned that the U.K. Supreme Court ruled in April, 2025 that the legal definition of a woman under the 2010 Equality Act should be based on biological sex. An organization called Sex Matters then challenged the City of London Corporation, which runs the Heath, in court, but in January, 2026 the court dismissed the case. Meanwhile, the Corporation carried out a consultation, polling more than 38,000 people on the issue, and “86% of the respondents support[ed] the existing trans-inclusive access arrangements.”

Sex Matters is likely to take up the issue again, and Trans advocacy groups such as Translucent are speaking up as well. But a spokesperson for the City of London Corporation said, “The findings [of the consultation] will be presented to City Corporation committees, which will consider them alongside legal duties, equality impact assessments, safeguarding responsibilities and operational considerations. In the meantime, the current admission rules will remain in place until a final decision has been made by members. Further announcements will be made in due course.”

I like the “in due course.” As in the U.S., transgender exclusion has become a weapon in the culture wars and has generated much more heat than is warranted, especially given that most people nowadays, especially young people, don’t see their transgender family and friends as a problem. Perhaps it’s best to pause the litigation, think the issue through, and work toward a resolution that, rather than whipping up unnecessary fears, can lay them to rest.

But why have I taken up this matter at all? Let me go back to our trip to North Wales. Arriving in Llandudno en route to the island of Anglesey, we found a snack shack atop Great Orme outside an ancient copper mine dating back to the Bronze Age, 4,000 years ago. Since we weren’t planning to go down the mine, the kind man at the shack (where the wind was so fierce that it knocked Andrew over), told us that we could take our hot drinks into a second-hand bookshop inside the mine’s gift shop.


What a terrific bookshop it was! I was extremely disciplined and came away with only three books, one of which was The Matter of Wales: Epic views of a small country (1984), by one Jan Morris, a fascinating book that I have continued to read since our return from Wales. It was useful from the outset, with a helpful guide to Welsh pronunciation, and it conjured up the spirit of Wales along with its natural world, history, relationship to England, and resistance to foreign domination.

What I didn’t expect to learn, when looking up the author to learn more about her, was that Jan Morris was born James Morris, who made a name for himself as an intrepid journalist for the Times of London and then the Manchester Guardian covering the ascent of Everest in 1953, the Suez crisis in 1957, and the Cuban revolution in 1959, just to mention some of his early work. But James Morris had known from the age of four that he was female in his innermost self, and being who he was, set out to do something about it. Not only was Morris one of the first well-known people to undertake gender reassignment surgery, but she was one of the first to write a book, Conundrum (1974), about her transition. When Conundrum was published, she was attacked quite viciously by some of the mainstream media and even by feminists like Rebecca West and Germaine Greer (who said that she wasn’t a woman), but the outpouring of letters of thanks from readers more than made up for the negativity.

Morris died in North Wales in 2020 at age 94, and just last month, in April, 2026, a biography, Jan Morris: A Life, was published, written by Sarah Wheeler. Here’s Morris’ obituary in the Guardian and a review of Wheeler’s biography. You might also be interested in watching Michael Palin’s 2016 video interview with Morris in her home in Wales when she was 90 years old and in reading a Guardian article on her at the very end of her life.

What Jan Morris would have made of the current anti-trans crusades, I do not know, but it was interesting to me that I came across her fascinating book on Wales, one of more than 50 that she wrote in her lifetime, at this particular moment in time. When she made the transition from male to female, she took the negative criticism in her stride and continued to write as prolifically as she had been doing all along, but in coming out publicly as she did in 1974 she also made life that much easier for the many people who could not even be recognized at the time. I’m glad that the City of London Corporation is also taking the bathing pond controversy in its stride and keeping the current inclusive policy in place—for now, at least. “Further announcements will be made in due course.”

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Reflections on A-to-Z 2026: War and Peace

In Notes on May 8, 2026 at 9:41 pm


My theme for this year’s A-to-Z April Challenge was War and Peace. I had considered a number of other themes, but when it came down to it there was only one subject, given what was happening in the world at large. I tried my level best in each post to balance the devastation with at least some glimmer of hope, although that was not always possible. But with the eXception of X, I accompanied every entry with one or more songs that matched the letter or the spirit of the day. 

Here is a hyperlinked list of my abecedarian efforts for the month. Afterwards I’ll reflect on the whole experience, say a little about the work of my fellow-bloggers who read my posts faithfully and whose writing I followed in return, and close with some reflections on the A-to-Z challenge itself, which I first took up in 2013 and have now completed 10 times.  

636. Anti-Vietnam War Movement

637. Bombs Away!

638. The Cold War

639. (De)humanization

640. Equal Rights

641. Freedom

642. Guns: Bringing War Home

643. Humanitarian Aid

644. Independence & Interdependence

645, Johnny Got His Gun

646. Kings and Oligarchs

647. Let’s Work Together

648. Militarization

649. No Nukes!

650. Overcoming Oppression

651. The Peace Pagoda

652. Quit India Movement

653. Reconstruction and Recovery

654. Sovereign States

655. Till by turning, turning we come round right. 

656. Uncle Tich

657. Veterans

658. War

659. Xenophiles

660. Yes-Men

661. Zimbabwe

Ten Years in the April A to Z Blogging Challenge

Reflections
The participating blogs I followed most closely this year, and whose authors followed me in return, were: The Curry Apple Orchard, Finding Eliza, Tao-Talk, How would you know. . ., Marina Owens, Its PH, and Time and Tide. They were, respectively: a measured and moving journal of a cancer diagnosis and treatment; a mind-boggling genealogical retracing of the families of the author’s maternal and paternal grandparents; an A to Z of glorious goddesses from around the world; an encyclopedic and lavishly illustrated A to Z of fabrics; a set of beautifully designed postcards of notable women; a “mind map” of unconscious biases, proving that we have innumerable ways of deceiving ourselves; and an exploration of strange and unusual customs, traditions, and phenomena in India,” proving once again that you can never come to the end of India’s diversity. 

I must apologize to all of you for having commented unevenly. My only excuse is that after scrambling to finish my own post every day I simply ran out of time.

I must give a special mention to the prolific and delightful author of Doses of Wild YAM, who has participated in the A-to-Z Challenge before but despite not participating this year, faithfully posted alliterative comments on my blog and those of several others. Thank you, YAM! And a special thank you to Lisa of Tao-Talk for her close reading and generous comments. Don’t know how you found the time, Lisa!

Thanks, too to my friends Cynthia, Sartaz, Anna, Maureen, and Barbara for their Likes, encouraging comments, and late-night phone calls (that’s you, Sartaz!); to my husband Andrew, for his careful proofreading and acute editorial comments; and to J Lenni Dorner of the A-Z team, who graced me with two visits and much-appreciated words of encouragement. 

My biggest regret this month was not keeping up with enough new blogs—ones that were new to me, that is. Just a handful of these were: Word Philosopher. The Misadventures of Widowhood, Once Upon a Time and Happily Ever After Again; Brizzy May’s Books and Bruschetta, Janet’s Smiles, and Earlier Years. I hope to return to some of them during the Road Trip.

To respond to a couple of the questions from the A to Z Team:
—Although I missed it this year I do like the Theme Reveal. It announces one’s participation in advance, helping to build excitement and anticipation, to pique readers’ curiosity, and, I believe, to drum up readership for the month. 
—The Reflections post helps me to look back on a month of intensive writing that is always a blur; to thank everyone who made the month meaningful for me; and to post a hyperlinked list of my A-to-Z posts for future readers.
—I do plan to participate in the Challenge again next year, if I can come up with a topic early enough to allow me to draft some of the posts in advance, and if I choose a topic that will allow me to jump-start a longer writing project. 

Here’s to having got through another April A to Z! It always inspires me with its creative community of fellow-bloggers and gets me writing again when I’ve started to fear that I’ve forgotten how.

Thanks to the A to Z Team for this!


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