The Yule Days

This Scottish equivalent of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ is from Popular Rhymes of Scotland by Robert Chambers (1870 version, though I would think the rhyme is much older than that). I’ve often thought that both songs could have served as a challenge in how well Christmas/ Yule revellers could carry their drink – especially as most people can’t even get the Twelve Days of Christmas straight when sober…

The king sent his lady on the first Yule Day
A papingo-aye*.
Who learns my carol and carries it away?

So far so easy. But by the end of the song, we’re up to

The king sent his lady on the thirteenth Yule Day
Three stalks o’ merry corn, three maids a-merry dancing,
Three hinds a-merry hunting, an Arabian baboon**,
Three swans a-merry swimming,
Three ducks a-merry laying, a bull that was brown,
Three goldspinks, three starlings, a goose that was gray,
Three plovers, three partridges, a papingo-aye.
Who learns my carol and carries it away?

*a parrot (as you do)

** don’t ask

And a Happy New Year to all our readers…

Music on the Brain

This is something I’ve had for years – the tune or song or poem, usually in fragmentary form, that keeps repeating insistently in one’s head - though I only recently found out the word for it: earworm, from the German ohrwurm. Well, yes, OK, that’s how it gets in there in the first place, but that’s not how it actually works, of course. The thing is in your mind, not your ear.

Dr James Kellaris of the University of Cincinnati is credited with the Cognitive Itch theory – some tunes have properties which act on the brain as histamines do on the skin, and one instinctively ‘scratches’ (replicates) them. I’m marginally more convinced by Daniel Wegner’s theory of ironic process, which suggests a failure of mental control – in order to get the tune off the brain, you have to repeat it. But even that doesn’t sound like the whole story, if only because not all earworms, or indeed earworm hearers, are alike.

Some people call it ‘last tune’ syndrome because it often is the last one that you heard – but not necessarily. A true, really persistent, damn-this-bloody-tune-go-away earworm can be unbelievably hard to shift, even if you hear something else you prefer. Some people find that completing it (or listening to a complete version of it) does the trick; others manage to substitute a different one, or leave it to go away – but there’s no foolproof solution and probably no such thing as a welcome earworm in the end. I doubt that there’s anything that I could bear to hear in perpetuity, not even the tunes in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

In general the more persistent ones are well known to the hearer. You might get an attractive new tune in there, and even encourage it, but unless you hear it a quite a bit more very soon, it will often be ousted fairly quickly by something easier to remember. ‘Lisa Lân’, a Welsh folk song that I’d never heard before, though I managed to keep it for a while, was rapidly replaced by two much more familiar Irish ones with some similarities of tune and theme: ‘My Lagan Love’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair’ (and yes, they were still there the next morning, along with bits of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which is always quite persistent once it occurs).

The worst of it is when it’s something that you really can’t stand in the first place. There are some I run a million miles from, metaphorically speaking, and am courting disaster by even writing about. ‘Sugar Sugar’ by the Archies is one, and Middle of the Road’s ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’; just about anything by Abba is a risk, though I don’t mind those, really, but top of the list for me is almost certainly The Carpenters’ ‘Goodbye to Love’ – “No one ever cared if I should live or die…There are no tomorrows for this heart of mine” (why not just go and slit your wrists now?). Bah, humbug! I hate it!

A former colleague, of whom I was otherwise very fond, used to drive me distracted by singing her earworm out loud, probably quite unconsciously. She had just the one, and it was The Inkspots’ 1940s hit ‘I don’t want to set the world on fire’ – which would have been fine, if a bit repetitious, but it was just that one line of it, nothing more. One day I did try joining in with the next line to see if it would jog her a bit further, but it was no use. She was stuck in that particular groove and we just had to hope that the Welfare Officer would never hear her…

Why?

You do have to wonder about what some people do, but still I’d like to know:

Why put on a pair of smart new (usually black) shoes or boots and leave the whopping great white price stickers on the soles for the rest of us to see?

Why stand on a cliff edge or go up a church tower if you know you can’t stand heights and don’t have to be there?

Or continue watching a television programme or reading a book that offends?

Why break the news of your parent’s death to a family friend by inscribing it in a birthday card you send them, especially when prefaced “I know you won’t like to hear it this way, but…”

Why stop the minute you step off an escalator? It’s about as sensible as slamming on the brakes on a motorway, especially without checking who’s behind – what are they supposed to do to stop being moved forward? For those behind the one who suddenly stops, it’s frightening enough on a short escalator (in a department store, for example) and bloody terrifying on a long one, like some of the London Underground ones. And infinitely worse going up, of course – much further to fall. And before anyone says it, in my experience it never is people with e g mobility difficulties or small children who are the perpetrators.

Why tell a secret to someone at the top of your voice in public? An extreme version of this is the person who feigns sick leave and then brags about it on the web, or even worse, the person who is being interviewed for television, and naively adds at the end of some indiscreet comment “But I could never tell my mother/ husband/ employer/ whoever” – oh, right, but haven’t you just done that? Even if they’re not watching, somebody will tell them. It’s not advisable to assume nobody can understand you, just because you’re not speaking the language of the country you’re in, or you’re with non-natives. Yelling secrets to somebody above the noise of the tube or train isn’t terribly bright, either: “Do you know X?” ”Ooh, yes, I had a fling with him once – but don’t tell anybody!!!” Don’t tell anybody? Don’t tell anybody???? She’s just told a hundred people, but her mate’s supposed to be sworn to secrecy? Of course a carriage full of passengers doesn’t count, and it won’t mean anything to anyone. Except that it may well do…

If Only It Were Always That Easy…

Yesterday morning I finally got round to taking the cats to the vet for their annual jabs and check-up, and six-monthly anti-flea shots. I always do this with a slight reluctance, since it can be quite an undertaking. For one thing, these days the vets have an appointments-only system. Can’t blame them for that, as the surgery almost always used to overrun, but it does mean that it matters if we’re late or don’t make it (can’t find cats, cab arrives late or not at all). It also means doing it on a Saturday (and they, and we, get very booked up) or taking half a day’s leave because my place of work is the other side of London and I can’t otherwise get home in time (OK, so that’s my choice). Then Sally finds the whole business so stressful that she often arrives with a soiled container, which I feel equally awful about on three counts: the cab driver has to get rid of the smell from his vehicle, the nurses always clean and reline the container (even to the extent of replacing the towel once recently), and it causes Sal extra distress. So I starve them after midnight and try to encourage use of a soil tray before we go, all of which they are deeply unimpressed by. Then the appointments tend to run late, which means sending the cab driver away and often having to wait quite a while for another when we’ve finished.

But anyway. Yesterday it went just about as smoothly as could be. Found and boxed the cats – OK, so it took two of us, and there had to be Deep Excavations (Sally from behind a pile of boxes, Harry from behind the television). And just how is it that when you try to put them in their carriers, the cats always have eight legs apiece, each of which is at least a foot long and at right angles to their bodies? But we set off in good time (even if I did forget their record books in the euphoria), arrived early with no mishaps of any kind, and were seen early, too, for oce. They haven’t put on any weight, despite eating for England at the moment, and passed their checkups apart from the fact that Sally will need a tooth extracting (Louise the vet tells me that there have been attempts to fill cats’ teeth, but that they tend to lick the fillings out!). Harry (world’s huggiest cat) had his usual fan club session with the female members of staff, who fell for him in a big way earlier this year when he spent some weeks with them having a bladder problem sorted out. A short wait for our driver to return, we arrived back and the mogs were tucking into breakfast, all within an hour of leaving!

I’m sure that at least part of what helped was that we were being chauffeured by our friend Les, who drives a Mercedes, thus providing a smooth ride. You can’t say our cats don’t have good taste!

Autumn Bites!

Autumn Bites!

As the weather has been so iffy recently (it’s a bit much when we can’t even have a decent September!), time to bring on the appropriate sustenance. Recently on the menu here:

‘Beef and Salad’ casserole (beef, tomatoes, peppers, fennel, onions, garlic)
Garlic potatoes
Red cabbage
Ham and pasta, with olives, tomatoes, garlic
Jacket potatoes with chilli beef
Home-made soup
Vegetable curry (has to include potatoes and butterbeans)
Lemony roast chicken
Mince pies
Apple and cherry brandy crumble (seriously good!)

Which reminds me - mince pies, like hot cross buns, can be bought all year round these days, of course. An interesting way of wiping out a seasonal custom!

Outside in

As the media hunts desperately for some way of refuting the charge that they are stoking up the economic crisis, and the accompanying anxiety, alarm and despair, I thought I’d try something a bit more traditional.

On my desk at work is a Thorson’s pocket edition of some of the Dalai Lama’s writings, and I sometimes open it at random, in the way rural communities used to use their Bibles. The results are never less than interesting, and sometimes strikingly appropriate – unsurprisingly, as this is a form of dowsing “Please give me what I need”. Today I found myself reading a passage which contained the following

…No matter how forceful [suffering and anxiety] is, it cannot destroy the supreme source of my happiness, which is my calmness of mind. This is something an external enemy cannot destroy. Our country can be invaded, our possessions can be destroyed, our friends can be killed, but these are secondary for our mental happiness….

He goes on to say that the ultimate source of mental happiness is a person’s peace of mind, and the only thing which can destroy that is their anger – very Buddhist, yes, and it takes a lot more detachment than many of us have (me included) to achieve that level of serenity. The Christian approach is God-centred – external but not of this world: my Bible similarly opened at random came up with “I will mention the loving kindnesses of the Lord…in all their affliction he was afflicted…and he bare them and carried them all the days of old” (Isaiah chapter 63). Or if u knowz Lolcat , hooz God is Ceilin(g) Cat:
Im gonna tell ov teh kindnesez ov the lord…In all their distres he 2 wuz distresd…He liftd them up an carrid them All the dais ov old…”

But whatever you feed it with, my instincts are that the mechanism for happiness is internal, which is by no means confined to Buddhism. My personal anthology also contains a Wiccan tenet that I wrote there many years ago:

If ye find it not within, so ye shall find it not without.

In the first year at Grammar School in 1963

So many new things to learn: parsing, theorems, contours, declensions, hockey, javelin-throwing, threading a sewing machine…and later on, magnetic poles, precipitation, dinghy sailing, paper sculpture, soused herrings, and Rumanian dancing, among other things.

Recently I managed to decipher our first year timetable from a sheet in my geometry set*, and it looks pretty hefting stuff for a bunch of eleven-year-olds. Day 1 was the real killer: Maths, Geography, French, History, Latin, English, and more French, all in the same room. The other days did at least have a small amount of moving about, and some less academic subjects (double Art on Day 2, Singing and PE on 3, Art and Music on 4, double Games on 5, and double Needlework on 6, although it’s debatable how much light relief some of that was). This was a rotating timetable, which I can't believe was unique to my school, but I've never heard of anyone else using it: first week days 1-5, second week days 61234, and so on).

*The geometry set was, needless to state, a proper one, with a pair of compasses which had a good long sharp metal point, and a pair of dividers which had two good long sharp metal points (all the better to prod things with, my dear). I recently bought the current version by the same maker (Helix) – the compasses have a pathetically tiny point, to the extent that I’m surprised it holds position on the paper at all, and the dividers are conspicuous by their absence. It does at least still come in a metal box, not a plastic one, which was a pleasant surprise, although you don’t get the nice stencil with the retorts and flasks and things any more (presumably because nobody in their right minds is going to let the little dears loose with real scientific experiments and equipment these days).