A Beatles birthday marathon

It was Yuko's birthday. Yuko was one of the best friends I had while I lived in Japan, and we often went to sing karaoke together. But this time was particularly special.

Yes, it was her birthday. That's the first thing that made it memorable. It was also the first time I'd gone to karaoke at ten o'clock in the morning! Yuko's boyfriend wanted to take her out for dinner in the evening, so Yuko, another friend, and I headed off early to the karaoke house near her place. We thought we'd order some tasty karaoke snacks for lunch while we sang the day away.

With just three of us, we could always choose exactly the songs we wanted. But at some stage that got difficult, and one of us came up with a stunning idea: we would sing the entire Beatles repertoire, from A to Z. That might sound impossibly onerous, but thankfully the karaoke machine there only had about 40 Beatles songs listed.

But 40 songs turned out to be more than our voices could handle. We started out with "All My Loving" and got through some of our favorite hits like "Back in the USSR", "Birthday" (of course), and "Get Back". Finally, we got about half way through the list, to "Hard Day's Night (A)". It was a particularly croaky rendition, and we agreed that it was probably time to call it a day. "We'll finish it next time," we all agreed, "We'll start from 'Help' next time."

Unfortunately, I soon moved away from Japan and the three of us never got together in a karaoke box again. But if I hear "Hard Day's Night" I get a strong desire to hop on a plane to Japan and finish off our Beatles marathon.