A Time to Mourn, Again

Once again, this blog is going to go into mourning as a good friend (who has been kind enough to regularly read it) has had a close relative pass away.

The blog colours will go to black and I'll suspend blogging a while. It seems appropriate.

Please pray for the loss of a father and the comfort of the bereaved.

Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary, be with them in their hour of need.

This Might Give You a Lift...Or Maybe Not...

 

When the Christmas Tree Comes Down

I find this time of year very melancholy. Years ago I wrote a two-verse poem trying to capture this melancholy, but I can only find one verse now:

The time is past for tinsel
The holly’s out of date
The clockwork Santa’s lost the will
To celebrate.
The workday world is rousing;
It hates a paper crown.
What’s left of the carousing
When the Christmas tree comes down?

I do remember that the second verse had one line that went something like: "The Three Kings have left town". 

I felt this especially at Epiphany Mass on Tuesday. Hearing the last Christmas carols of the season made me feel more than melancholy-- almost grief-stricken. I've never been able to get used to transience, and it bothers me more as I grow older. My least favourite word is "goodbye" (although I'll admit it's tremendously evocative in titles; Goodbye To All That, Goodbye Lenin, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, etc.)

Admittedly some of the melancholy had other causes. Recently I've lost some friendships that I had hoped would be lifelong. Not through estrangement, or death, but circumstances. A longstanding group of which I was a happy member has broken up-- my Inklings, you might say. Still friends, but I don't expect I will see most of them often again-- if ever. A breaking of a fellowship.

(My hatred of transcience is one reason that I'll never stop writing this blog, until death or something else intervenes! I don't "do" endings-- if I can possibly help it.)

Should We Capitalize the Seasons and the Points of the Compass?

 It's a question.

The Embarrasing Right-Wing Old Dude Archetype in Comedy

Have you ever noticed how prominent this is, especially in British comedy?

Alf Garnett. Alan Partridge. David Brent. Chris Finch (in the same show). Rigsby in Rising Damp. Bail Fawlty ("if they don't like making cars, why don't they get themselves another bloody job designing cathedrals or composing violin concertos?"). Mr. Mackay in Porridge.

From about the 1970s onwards, nearly every comedy "villain" in British situation comedy is conservative or right-wing. I'm sure I could go on, but I don't have time.

The End of Christmas

That's Just Completely Gratuitous, That Is

I was re-reading my diary from 2016 when I came across this section:

I've just been watching scenes from Some Kind of Monster [a documentary about the band Metallica], and the scene where Kirk Hammett plays a special song he wrote in driving school. It reminds me of other moments where something completely unnecessary happened, and filled me with gladness.

Like the way the teachers in my school did a Line Dance on one day before the holidays once.

Or the time my father bought me and my brother all those cakes and biscuits before the first day of the 1994 World Cup, that he knew we were looking forward to so much.

Or the time my aunt put out a barrell that said "Fáilte" when me, my brother, and my motherwere arriving at the farm.

Or the time J----- B----- and J--- H----- both told me to 'wrap up warm' before I was going to America.

Or the time my wife arranged for me to get a helium balloon on my birthday.

Or the time, on one of the British channels, there was a wolf's howl after the close-down on a night they had been showing horror films.

The latter happened probably forty years ago-- back when TV stations still closed down for the night. I still think about it regularly.

A Sponderful Woonerism

"Jesus wasn't faney or foke."

Heard at Mass in Dublin last Sunday morning.

Happy Feast of the Epiphany!

 

I happened upon this picture yesterday. It's actually me going to the library Christmas party last year. (The wife of the university's deputy President came up to me and said I won the competition for most Christmassy, or something like that.) Looking at it now, I think I resemble some kind of festive Che Guevara.

Anyway, Happy Epiphany, Three Kings, etc. The library took down all its Christmas decorations yesterday-- rather ironic, considering all the talk of cultural sensitivity, given that today is such a big day in so many other cultures.

In Ireland, of course, it's Nollaig na mBan (Women's Christmas or Little Christmas), when men would do the housework and make meals etc. The Irish media loves Nollaig na mBan, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in today's context. I've noticed that our feminist society still wants all the trappings of chivalry! But I'm in favour of almost all traditions, so I don't mind.

Excellent video on the Nineteen-Seventies...

...from the NationSquid channel, a channel which is completely new to me. Watch it here.

The seventies have always been my favourite era. I was born in 1977 so I can't claim to have any conscious experience of them. I'm not nostalgic for them in any conscious way, since I was only a baby. But I'm vicariously nostalgic for them. (Maybe I would have hated them if I'd actually lived through them. Who knows?)

I tried to write about the atmosphere of the seventies in this post, but I'm not sure how successful I was.

The funny thing is, it's the very things that other people hold against the seventies that I like about them. All the Year Zero utopianism of the Sixties was gone-- thank God! I even like the interior decoration, the clothes, the earthen colours, the grunginess.

Aside from the seventies, I love any kind of writing (or analysis) that goes deep into a subject-- beyond the surface, into that which is underlying. I'm constantly frustrated that reviews of films, books, and other works concentrate so much on the foreground (plot, characters, acting, etc.) and so little on the deeper aspects-- theme, ideas, relation to history and current affairs, and so on.

It's exciting to think that, at any moment, we are embedded in a greater drama-- even if we are standing in a supermarket queue or sitting in the barber's. 

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.