The Life of Riley

Happy New Year!

What's the first song you listened to in 2026? Perhaps it was "Aul Lang Syne", if you were at a New Year's Eve party. Or if you were watching a countdown show on TV.

I suppose it's possible you haven't listened to your first song of the year yet-- which might make you ponder the choice.

Firsts and lasts always seem significant to me, so I made sure to listen to a few optimistic songs at the beginning of the year.

The very first was "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac, which isn't exactly one of my favourite songs, but which I like well enough. It's hard to think of a more upbeat, optimistic song, so that's the first that came to mind.

My second choice was "The Life of Riley" by the Lightning Seeds, which is one of my favourite songs of all time. Listening to the lyrics, and appreciating it anew, I decided to make it the subject of my first blog post in 2026.

"The Life of Riley" became well-known for its use on BBC's Match of the Day TV programme, back in the nineties. A looped sample of it was the backing music for the "Goal of the Month" segment of the show. "Goal of the Month" showed footage of great goals, and viewers got to vote for the best. So the music was already associated with dizzy heights (which is the name of a Lightning Seeds album) and euphoria-- because what else can you feel but euphoria, when you see a goal like this one?

The actual subject of the song is a father's hopes for his child. The songwriter Ian Broudie wrote it for his newborn son Riley.

Poems and songs that parents write for their newborn children can run the whole gamut of emotions (see, for instance, "A Prayer for my Daughter" by W.B. Yeats, or "Born Yesterday" by Philip Larkin-- though that one isn't written by a parent). "Life of Riley" is entirely hopeful, even (as I suggested earlier) euphoric. And why shouldn't it be? We have more than enough laments, and life is pretty wonderful despite all its detractors.

The lyrics aren't exactly literary, and they're not polished. But they do the trick, and they have some sublime moments. They begin like this:

Lost in the Milky Way
Smile at the empty sky and wait for
The moment a million chances may all collide
I'll be the guiding light
Swim to me through stars that shine down
And call to the sleeping world as they fall to Earth.

None of that makes a whole lot of sense. Why are the stars falling to earth? But I've never thought about that until this very moment. The impression they create is what matters.

I do think there's one great line in that opening verse, though. It's this one: "The moment a million chances may all collide". The internal sounds are very pleasing and harmonious, and it captures (for me) the sense of every moment's uniqueness.

The refrain is also excellent, in my view:

I don't mind, I've got the feeling

You'll be fine, I still believe that

In this world we've got to find the time

For the life of Riley.

"They are to be happy in", as Philip Larkin wrote, with bewitching naivety (about days). Or, as G.K. Chesterton put it, "The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn."

My favourite line in the song, though, comes in the bridge: "All this world is a crazy ride, so take your seats and hold on tight". The bridge itself evokes a sense of plummeting, like a long slide at a fairground. 

Personally, I love music lyrics which portray the hurly-burly of life in a positive way, like a romp or an adventure-- which is the best way of looking at it. (Another of these, although the metaphor isn't explicit in the song, comes from "The Cowboy Song" by Thin Lizzy:

Roll me over and turn me around

Let me keep spinning till I hit the ground

Roll me over and let me go

Riding in the rodeo.

I even love it when somebody says something like: "Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy one...")

The song makes me nostalgic. Nostalgia, for me, is always a rather fragile and bittersweet thing, since I wasn't a happy child or teenager. Nostalgia is linked to fragile, fleeting moments of optimism-- a glimpse of how things could have been.

The early nineties were a time of optimism in Ireland in my experience. But, aside from that, this song has happy associations for me. Myself, my brother, and my father used to watch Match of the Day every week, so it was something that brought us together.

Even more specifically, though, this song is attached to a particular memory. Myself and my brothers were shopping for Christmas gifts in Dublin city centre. We used to save our pennies and actually have meetings about what to buy for different people.

I remember it as a very crisp Winter's day-- and Winter weather always seems more invigorating and, somehow, granulated to me. Having more potential, in fact, for, "the moment a million chances may all collide". The city centre was full of shoppers and bustle and anticipation, and I have one memory of scented soap-- whether we bought it, or thought about buying it, or simply passed it in some shop.

I also remember-- and this is one of my favourite memories of all time-- a window display in Brown Thomas, the Harrod's of Dublin. It was a large model of a ship in a glass case of liquid, but the glass case was slowly and continuously sway from back to front, which made the liquid and the ship move. And the liquid was the richest, most shimmering blue-green I've ever seen.

As for the song, I remember hearing it in a music shop we went into. Music shops always have the best speakers, so it sounded amazing-- as crisp as the air that day, as sensuous as the scented soap, as richly-coloured as the liquid the ship was passing through. So the song carries all those associations, for me-- but I think it's pretty good even without them.

The Burning Babe, a Beloved (By Me) Christmas Tradition on This Blog

So I'm signing off for Christmas, and for 2025, with my now-traditional post of "The Burning Babe" by St. Robert Southwell.

(Mind you, I feel a little like a guy working alone in a basement who puts up Christmas decorations for himself, because I've never had the faintest indication that anyone else gives a hoot about this tradition of mine, now a decade old. Oh well.)

Here are my previous posts on the poem, including commentary on it:

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2015/12/more-seasonal-poetry.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-smoking-hot-babe-for-christmas.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-christmas-repeat.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-smoking-hot-babe-for-christmas-again.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2019/12/happy-christmas.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-smoking-hot-babe-for-christmas-again.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2021/12/burn-baby-burn.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2022/12/theres-baby-on-fire.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-burning-babe-with-sting-in-tale.html

https://irishpapist.blogspot.com/2024/12/a-hoary-christmas-tide-tradition.html

And here is the poem itself:

The Burning Babe by St. Robert Southwell

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,

Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;

And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,

A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;

Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed

As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.

“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,

Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;

The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,

For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,

So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”

With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,

And straight I calléd unto mind that it was Christmas Day.

So happy Christmas to everybody and thank you for reading, and especially for commenting-- comments are always hugely encouraging and welcome, much more than you might think. Otherwise I have no idea if anyone is reading or is interested.

(I will probably have very limited internet access over the holidays, so please forgive any tardiness in responding to emails, etc.)

Fifteen Stations of the Cross

I fairly frequently pray the Stations of the Cross in the UCD church. A few weeks ago, I took pictures of them, thinking I might post them here so that someone could actually use them for prayer. (I've often prayed the Stations of the Cross online, as well.)

No, they're not the nicest Stations. But they're fine. Apologies that some of the pictures are a bit blurry.

I include "Jesus Falls a Third Time" twice, since I happened to be very struck by this particular Station in the Sacred Heart Church, Donnybrook, and took a picture of it.

A Quick Thought on the Irish "Ballad Boom" of the 1960s.

I've been watching this documentary about The Dubliners (which seems to be the only documentary about the whole group on YouTube), and once again it has me musing over the 1960's "Ballad Boom".

There's no Wikipedia page on the subject of the "Ballad Boom". In fact, this is the closest I can get to a potted history of the phenomenon. And yet, it's frequently mentioned in Ireland. The term is used familiarly, often expecting the reader or viewer to know what it means.

The article I've linked to puts it like this: "The ‘ballad boom’, so called, refers to a period of some dozen years from the end of the 1950s to about 1970 when there was a nation-wide vogue in Ireland for the singing of (mostly) Irish songs in English by ballad groups: small vocal groups accompanying themselves with guitar, banjo and mandolin, and sometimes including a whistle player or other melody instrumentalist."

What especially intrigues me about the Ballad Boom is its timing, and its relation to the Irish cultural revival. Irish people began to value (and attempt to revive) their indigenous culture from about the late eighteenth century, although it was mostly isolated enthusiasts in those very early days. The real surge came in the late nineteenth century, with the founding of the Gaelic League (1893) and the Gaelic Athletic Association (1884), along with a plethora of other groups.

And after that...it's actually quite hard to trace the energies of Irish cultural revivalism. History books often include vague like this one: "After the heroic period of the Irish Revolution, the bread-and-butter realities of running a new state took over." But that doesn't really explain any cooling of fervour, if there was indeed a cooling of fervour. After all, there had been plenty of poverty during the Gaelic Revival and Irish Revolution, and surely only a small minority of people were actually concerned with building and administering the new state.

In any case, it's generally accepted that radio, television, and the beginning of consumer culture made Irish people more cosmopolitan and "outward-looking". So it seems strange that it was during the nineteen-sixties, the same time as the explosion of rock-and-roll and Beatlemania, that the Irish Ballad Boom took off. Was it part of the same wave, or was it some kind of counter-current? Or does that question even make sense?

Similarly, Irish language baby names grew in popularity long after the Gaelic Revival. As this article puts it: "Names such as Rían, Oisín, Tadhg, Fiadh and Éabha have featured in the top ten in recent years, with Fiadh being the most popular name for a girl in 2021. The only Irish language name to feature in the top 40 for boys in 1964 was Sean, which took the 38th spot that year."

The recent growth of Irish language schools or "gaelscoileanna" (schools where instruction is mostly through the Irish language) is another example: "In 1972, there were only 11 such schools at primary level and five at secondary level in the Republic of Ireland. As of September 2023, there were 188 gaelscoileanna at primary level, attended by over 40,000 students, and 32 gaelcholáistí and 17 aonaid Ghaeilge (Irish language units) at secondary level, attended by over 12,000 students in non-Gaeltacht areas across Ireland."

So Irish cultural revivalism is a curious and complex phenomenon. Is there a pattern underneath its apparent ebb and flow, or rather, its tendency to take different manifestations?

A Beautiful Christmas Meditation from Professor Bruce Charlton

Read it here.

I love this passage especially:

The more we realize how marvellous were the claims of Jesus Christ, the stranger the whole thing seems to be! 

So the better we grasp the reality of resurrection and Heaven - the less convincing seems any possible "evidence" brought out to support it! 

The only way that this can "work" (it seems to me) is when we grasp the-whole-thing all-at-once... when, or if, we understand what it is that Jesus did, and its wonder and strangeness, and simultaneously experience a deep conviction of its reality. 

That's probably what is meant by "faith" - not so much choosing to believe the extraordinary; as that we need to "get it" and "want it" at the same moment: by the same inner act.

"Both get it and want it" certainly expresses how I feel about the Christian revelation. There have even been fleeting moments where I've felt gratitude to have been brought into existence just so I could witness to Christianity, or at least try to.

This puts me in mind of the "scandal of particularity". It seems so strange that God should have revealed Himself in the way He did...almost crude. And yet, how wonderful and how delightful, how poetic! 

Favourite Poems: The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Since it's Christmas, here's another of my favourite Christmas poems.

I don't have a whole lot to say about it. It's a simple poem, and its greatness more or less lies in its last two lines.

It's very efficient. I've only noticed now that the first verse wouldn't make any sense without the title. Hardy explains the superstition, and sets the stage, in extraordinarily few words.

I must say I can never remember being as credulous (or lacking in cynicism) as Hardy portrays the company in the second verse.

The last verse, and especially the magnificent last line, always makes me sob. It captures the whole tragedy of disenchantment (not only individual, but social and cultural) in a few syllables. I think it captures it even better than Arnold's famous lines about the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith-- although that, too, is magnificent and fully deserves its fame.

The Oxen by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

Postscript: I've just come across this sad passage, in a Church Times article about Hardy and religion: "On his deathbed, in the darkness of midwinter, he requested that the story of Christ’s nativity should be read to him. Afterwards, he pointed out that there was no evidence to support its veracity." 

Sceptics always seem to want everything in the Christian religion to have independent evidence, rather than accepting cumulative or composite evidence. This standard isn't applied to anything else, as far as I can see. A colleague once lamented to me that there were no modern miracles to attest to the supernatural. When I mentioned the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, in 1917, she said: "I mean something more recent, though."

(Apologies for the formatting glitch, but I've spent far too long trying to get rid of it already.)

Philosophy in Childhood

Two memories of philosophical thoughts in childhood occurred to me today.

The first was an occasion when I was coming back from the zoo on a bus. I was tired of being on the bus and I wanted to be at home. But it suddenly occurred to me that I never would be at home and I never would be off the bus. I had a strong impression that every point on the graph of life is an independent existence, so the little Maolsheachlann that was on the bus would be a different person to the little Maolsheachlann that was at home. I couldn't have articulated this, but I thought it very clearly in a wordless way.

On another occasion, I was walking home from school and trying to decide whether to get a chocolate bar (specifically, a Fry's Chocolate Cream) in the shop I would pass on the way. I realized that one of two things would happen; I would get the chocolate bar, or I wouldn't get the chocolate bar. But I didn't know which it was going to be! Where exactly would the decision be made? It seemed like something outside of me, somehow.

Maybe that's not philosophy. But it's something close to it, I think.