Can You Suggest Me More Songs LIke this?

 

"Hall of Mirrors" by Horslips is one of my all-time favourite songs. I would like to find more songs like it.

By which I mean, songs that contain one or more of the following characteristics:

1) Using imagery that draws on funfairs or carnivals.

2) Psychedelic, even if mildly psychedelic.

3) Using vague but rather heavy-handed metaphors for life experience.

Any suggestions?

Twenty Years of the God Delusion

I've just read that The God Delusion, the central text of the New Atheist movement...is now twenty years old!

In one way, it's hard to believe. In another, it's easy. The book seems to belong to a very different era now.

I bought it perhaps a year or two after it came out. I was still hovering between agnosticism and faith at that time. As many people have said, the actual arguments in the book are very poor, but the strength of Dawkins's conviction was quite intimidating.

When I started this blog in 2011, it was very much in the atmosphere of the New Atheist moment.

I'm glad that moment has gone, but I did like one aspect of it: the resurgence of Christian apologetics that it spurred. The New Atheists demanded evidence, and Christian apologists were suddenly in demand. As Edward Feser says here, the New Atheist onslaught did have the benefit of making Christians seek rational grounds for their belief.

Times are changed now. Militant atheists like Richard Dawkins have been replaced by respectful atheists such as Alex O'Connor. Flame wars have been replaced by friendly dialogue.  Richard Dawkins has become something of an ally, pushing against woke and defending cultural Christianity. Another New Atheist (though one I was only ever vaguely aware of), Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has become a Catholic. And I get the impression that many of the rank-and-file of the New Atheist movement are now either believers or have at least come to appreciate Christianity. (I've heard plenty of accounts of that journey, though I can't remember where exactly.)

And there are even some hopeful signs that a Christian revival is coming about.

So we have much to be grateful for. But let's hope that the beefing-up of apologetics that came about in the New Atheist era doesn't wither away.

Dead Letters: A Poem

I haven't written poetry in a long time. My spirit was broken by the (non)-reaction to my poetry on Facebook, over years. I'll probably get back to it eventually.

I've just raided my archives looking for a poem. Most of them are poor, in my view. Here's one I wrote in Dublin Airport (of all places) some time early in the millennium. It's not bad, I think.

My entire life, I've had an obsession with memory and oblivion. Is it healthy? I don't know. It makes a poem, anyway.

A sure-nuff archivist has told me that wearing latex gloves is not encouraged in archives as it reduces dexterity. I'd heard that already, although I can't remember if it was before I'd written this poem, or afterward.

Dead Letters

Folded and read and folded so often now–
The fingers that folded it first, the eyes that read
Stopped work last century. In latex gloves
The doctorate student folds it, wonders how
Her days will be replayed when she is dead.
Those hour-long evening phone calls that she loves
Will leave no trace. What will her photos say?
She smiled at weddings, liked to dress in green.
She’s poured her soul through a keyboard now for years
But none of that was ever stored away
In a cardboard box. Her life unrolls on screen;
Each day gets written, sent, and disappears.

What then? The video her sister made
One Halloween? A camera never caught
One motion of the soul. What’s to be seen
In a winter’s evening endlessly replayed?
No trace or what she loved or what she thought–
Life’s glories gone as if they’d never been.

She thought of all that’s tapped out, signalled, said;
An endless thirst for words endlessly fed;
And all will die before these words of the dead.

Favourite Movie Scenes #3: Shaft (1971)

Shaft is one my favourite movies of all time. It's far more than a brilliant soundtrack. It's full of goodies all the way through, especially the slick dialogue. (Such as the gangster who always answers his phone: "Wrong number".)

Yes, it has a lot of racial themes, and race is one my least favourite subjects (because it's been weaponized in the way it has been). But the movie is from the "Black is Beautiful" era, which is at least a positive approach. The film is also gloriously un-PC, even for a time long before PC.

Most of all, I love the look and atmosphere of the film. It's so deliciously seedy, run-down, ramshackle, and streetwise. (The opening montage of Tradings Places is another great evocation of this atmosphere-- which I don't find at all unpleasant or even unpoetic.)

Although there's far more to this film than the famous opening scene, how could I not choose the opening scene? Isaac Hayes's theme might be the greatest opening credits theme of any film ever. And John Shaft's swagger as he makes his way to his office, through a panorama of the American seventies, is beautiful. I've several times listened to this music as I walked into work. (I never use headphones when I'm moving about, so everyone I pass hears it, too.)

For Crying Out Loud

I saw this book in a bookshop today. I have no idea who Jamie Laing is, but the title completely exasperated me.

I'm forty-eight years old. Reader, I have never (ever ever) been told that boys don't cry. Not by a parent. Not by a teacher. Not by a kid in the street. Never, by anyone.

I was never told that boys or men shouldn't have feelings.

I was never told that boys or men shouldn't be vulnerable.

I'm guessing very few boys have been told this in recent decades. If, indeed, they ever were.

But here is what boys have been told for decades now.

That they are somehow complicit (no matter what they do) in something called The Patriarchy which wields absolute power and crushes men, women, children, the environment, and probably dogs and cats under the weight of its iron fist.

That they are vicariously guilty for anything bad that a man has ever done. (It doesn't work the opposite way, strangely-- they don't get any reflected glory for the achievements of Shakespeare, Edison, Tolkien, etc.)

That there is something called toxic masculinity and that they are somehow a part of it.

That their natural desires are "the male gaze", which is something to be ashamed of.

That, no matter how bad their life is or how much they might feel they are at the bottom of the heap, they have something called "male privilege".

And so on. And so on.

Society ladles endless helpings of guilt on boys from their earliest days. But not for crying.

Favourite Movie Scenes #2

Well, it's more a couple of scenes than a single scene, but they go well together. The last few minutes of Zodiac (2007).

I remember a colleague raving about this film when it came out. For whatever reason, I wasn't interested and I didn't go to see it.

Then, more recently, my favourite podcast Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World featured a few episodes about the Zodiac killer, and I found myself searching the film out. I was hugely impressed. Quentin Tarantino has put it in his list of the ten best films of the twenty-first century. High praise indeed. (My favourite film is Groundhog Day, but I think Pulp Fiction is the greatest and most accomplished film ever made.)

As wtih many of my favourite scenes, it's the crackling tension and understated drama between two characters that I love.

The musical choice at the very end of the film is also inspired. I'd never heard "Hurdy Gurdy Man" before, except in the film itself, but it's amazing how such an apparently innocuous song can sound utterly sinister in this context.

Somehow, this film seems to be about much more than a serial killer, or even an investigation into a serial killer, although it's hard to say exactly what that "much more" is.

A Video Worth Watching

For the last week or so, I've been watching (in instalments) the long video below, which traces the family tree of Christian denominations (going right back to the Jewish roots of Christianity, before Jesus). It's fascinating stuff, presented objectively, and rather warmly and sympathetically to each denomination.

I was surprised, almost amazed, at how much I didn't know. There were many denominations I'd never even heard about, such as the intriguing Two-by-Two Church. I expect to rewatch the video several times, and to use it as a springboard to look into the more interesting of the denominations it mentions (as I've already been doing).

The narrator, on several occasions, mentions another YouTube channel, Ready to Harvest, which I expect I'll also be exploring at length. It describes itself as: "Christian Denominations explained in a neutral and concise way."

Love of the Poor

A quick thought: whenever I read the lives of the saints (or Christian holy people), one constant that strikes me is their love of the poor.

Not just a humanitarian desire to make life better for the poor, but a positive love of the poor themselves-- as human beings, not objects of charity.

George Bernard Shaw famously wrote: "For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination." Obviously, he was being provocative and epigrammatic here: he didn't want to exerminate poor people, but to exterminate poverty. (He also said he wanted to exterminate the other classes.)

I think we all tend to be Shavians today, in this regard. We see nothing good in poverty.

This love of the poor and solidarity with the poor seems an aspect of the Christian tradition that is rather sidelined today, even among Christians.

The Pure Form, or the Drift and the Recoil

Going through my blog archives, I came across this post which I wrote in 2014. I think it's pretty good and stands up after all these years. (I've written a lot of other stuff that I read back with embarrassment.) I don't think I've ever seen anyone else make this point before, although of course somebody might well have and I just haven't read it.

It's four minutes past two a.m., I'm not sleepy, and an idea that has been buzzing around my head for a long time has finally come into focus. The phrase I can best use to describe it is 'the pure form'.

This is my theory; that in all human things, there is a pure form, an archetype, an ideal type, from which we constantly find ourselves drifting and to which we inevitably find ourselves returning. The drift from it is often incremental but the return to it is usually instant, like the recoil from a crossbow. I think this principle applies to so many aspects of human life.

Take comedy. There is an eternal attempt to escape the formulaic in comedy. It seems that jokes-- stories with a set-up, with certain recurring motifs such as triads, and with a punch-line-- are always going out of fashion, in favour of observational humour, surreal humour, 'alternative' humour, whimsical humour and anti-humour. Jokes like: "What's the difference between a duck? One of its legs are the same size" become all the rage. People groan at stock comedy characters like mothers-in-law and lovers hiding in closets.

But always there is the recoil. And, more often than not, the recoil is sudden and almost violent. The resistance against the pure form becomes unendurable, often in a single moment. It's like the moment a polite listener finally loses patience with a bore. And the very fact that the pure form might have become taboo in certain circles only makes its return all the more irresistible and defiant.

I think this principle applies to so many things. It applies to narrative-- the moment when the poseur finally puts down Proust and picks up Stephen King, with a mingled sense of shame and relief. It applies to political correctness-- the moment that someone gets tired of pretending that ethnic and other politically incorrect jokes are not funny. It applies to feminism-- the moment when the feminist gives up and admits that there's nothing arbitrary about the fact that women kiss each other and men shake hands, or that girls often prefer to play with dolls and boys to play with trucks. (I'm not saying a person can't go his or her entire life without ever succumbing to this recoil. But I am saying that humanity en masse, or in sufficient numbers, will always be subject to it over time.)

If I make it sound like this recoil is always from the idealistic to the disillusioned, or from the determined to the line of least resistance, that would not be a reflection of the reality. A dyed-in-the-wool cynic is disregarding the pure form as much as a hopeless sentimentalist. A drop-out, experiencing this moment of recoil, will cut his hair and buy a suit and become more disciplined. (Admittedly, this might in a sense be the line of least resistance, even though it requires more effort.)

My examples also suggest that the 'drift" is always in the direction of liberalism or progressivism, and the 'recoil' is always a return to conservatism. This is by no means the case, and my examples only betray my own experience and way of thinking. The 'recoil' tends not to be in a particular direction, but rather centripetal. In my own late twenties and early thirties, I became so ultra-conservative that I came to see the human hankering for novelty and excitement and exoticism as a kind of original sin. People who took package holidays to Tenerife, or were fascinated with gadgets or cars, were (I decided) traitors to the traditions of humankind. This was nonsense, of course.

The 'pure form' is not the golden mean, or moderation in all things. It's something very particular.

I don't believe that the 'pure form' is something that can necessarily be known, other than approximately. To take my first example; I think an old-fashioned joke-teller is closer to the 'pure form' of comedy than an alternative comedian such as Bill Hicks. But I wouldn't claim to be able to say exactly what the 'pure form' of comedy is, or where its boundaries lie. (And, of course, comedy is just an example.) I think the claim to know such things with certainty would be dangerous and potentially totalitarian-- if we accept my theory, of course.

One of the reasons I am a Catholic is because I believe Catholicism is the 'pure form' (in this sense) of Christianity. (I don't think this conflicts with what I just said. Even though some people see Catholicism as a religion ironclad with certainty, this is not the case. The Church doesn't claim to know everything. It doesn't even claim to know everything about spiritual things.)

The 'drift' against certain aspects of Catholicism is perpetual. People will always be coming up with objections, very plausible-sounding obections, against aspects of its teaching-- Papal infallibility, or Purgatory, or prayer to saints, or celibacy, or auricular confession, or sacramentals, or vestments, or venial sin.

But the recoil, the snap back into place, is inevitable.

I saw a documentary recently which mentioned that prayer to saints was coming back into the Church of England. Of course it is, I realized. It's such a natural instinct that it could only ever be kept at bay for a certain amount of time. Ditto with all the other aspects of Catholicism that are rejected at this or that moment of history. The reasons for the rejection are all very convincing and deep and sincere, and the rejection may indeed be made with gusto and a sense of released energy. But sooner or later-- perhaps over centuries-- sustaining the rejection starts to feel like standing on one leg. People start feeling they are missing out on the fullness of the faith. And hence we see moments like the Oxford Movement, or the current minor renaissance of orthodoxy amongst younger Catholics.

The picture is complicated because the drift and the recoil might be happening at the same time, in different ways. For instance, I think there is a drift against the Church's sexual and hierarchical teaching right now, even as their is a recoil towards its sacramental and artistic and contemplative heritage. Celibacy is out, while pilgrimages and the rosary and Eucharistic Adoration and lecto divina are in-- even amongst non-Catholics.

I don't think there is any moment of repose between the drift and the recoil. It is always one or the other-- though the majority might be drifting or recoiling while a minority, or an individual, is doing just the opposite. The drift lasts longer, but the recoil is more decisive.

I can observe drift and recoil in my own mind, in my own experience-- not only in the past, but actually in the present. It seems to be as inevitable as breathing. Something about human nature means we are always sliding away from some 'pure form' or other, or more likely, from many of them. I can relate this drift, in my own experience, to humble things like the cinema. I've gone through phases of 'drifting' away from action movies or superhero movies in favour of 'deep' movies that could be watched over and over again. But then the recoil happened, because action movies and supero movies are at least visually appealing, and usually have solid story-telling and some uplifting message. In fact, I am now 'drifting' in the opposite direction-- to the extreme that I only want to see pure entertainment, romantic comedies and action films and so forth, and I despise 'deep' movies. The 'pure form', I would guess, lies in neither of these directions-- but it's not bang in the middle either.

Very often we take the 'drift' for the 'recoil'. A rather hackneyed example; after the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea went around that the world was returning from the lie of communism to the inevitable truth of free market capitalism. But, while it's certainly true that free market capitalism is much closer to the 'pure form' of economics than communism is, it's not quite there-- or so, at least, I would argue. Humanity doesn't seem capable of reposing in it, anyway.

OK, now I'm tired. I hope this makes sense, but I'm too sleepy to make sure it does. Night night!

That's Right Wood Chuck Chuckers, it's...Groundhog Day!

Today is Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of our Lord. The account of the Presentation includes some of the most moving words in Scripture, (in my view) when Simeon holds the baby Jesus and says: "Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel." Why these words should be so moving, I'm not quite sure.

It's also Groundhog Day, which inevitably makes me think of my favourite movie of all time.

Here's a blog post I wrote back in 2012, soon after I started this blog, in which I explain why it's my favourite film of all time. I haven't changed my mind on any of it. (Although it's a while since I've watched the whole film through. I watch scenes from it on YouTube every now and again, like this morning. I almost know the dialogue by heart by now.)

I also watched this interesting YouTube video about the film's production, which taught me some stuff I hadn't known already. I was especially interested that Danny Rubin, the scriptwriter who came up with the original idea (and later wrote the screenplay with Harold Ramis), chose Groundhog Day as the day for the loop specifically because it was a more obscure occasion. I like that  lot. I've always disliked the fact that Christmas and a few other days in the year get all the attention.

Recently I made a note for a blog post entitled "the miracle of familiarity". Occasionally it srikes me as truly miraculous that we can ever find anything familiar, as life is simultaneous so strange and so fleeting.

All art is an island of permanence-- or the illusion of permanence-- in an ocean of flux. But this film especially, since it's about a timeloop. I'm always sad when Phil escapes the loop at the end. But not too sad, because he only exists inside the film anyway, and you can always just play it again.

Favourite Movie Scenes #1

I've long had the idea of posting about my favourite movie scenes. So I'm going to start now, with a scene from Casino Royale (2006).

(God Almighty, that was twenty years ago! I remember seeing it in the cinema.)

I've never been a big James Bond fan, though I like the idea of James Bond a lot. I like the thought of Bond as a British Institution, with all its attendant tradition-- the Bond song, the Bond girl, the opening credits sequence, the gadgets, etc.

When I love a movie scene, it's often because of its use of understatement. I love how we see the new Q and James Bond warm to each other after an opening gambit of insults-- it's very English, like Robin Hood and Little John fighting on the bridge. (Even the moment Q says "007", just as Bond is walking away, is brilliant. I also really like: "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don't really do that kind of thing anymore.")

Calling this one of my favourite movie scenes is a bit of a stretch, but I've found myself watching it a lot recently.

And after that, you can watch this fairly good sketch of a woke James Bond. "Extra decaf" is a brilliant line.

Happy St. Bridget's Day!

 

Time again for one of the very few poems I've written that I'm actually fairly happy with, especially the third verse. I wrote this quickly on my phone while walking along Sandymount Strand on a cold night. It's a lot better than many poems I laboured over for hours and days.

Bridget, Mary of the Gael

Your fire has never ceased to burn
A glow by which we live and learn
And when spring dawns our thoughts return
To Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

You are no pagan deity
But God bathed you mysteriously
In lights of ancient piety
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Within the Bridget's Cross we find
The fabric of the Gaelic mind
Folklife and faith securely twined
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

With Patrick and with Colmcille
You guided us to do God's will
In these dark days, be with us still
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

Ar uair ár mbás bí linn go fóill *
To watch, to comfort, and console
Spread out your cloak upon my soul
Dear Bridget, Mary of the Gael.

* In our moment of death be with us still.

A few years ago, near St. Patrick's Day, an acquaintance of mine greeted me by saying: "We have to brace ourselves for all the Paddywhackery now". I liked him until then. I've never really liked him since then. If you can't get into the spirit, what's the point of anything?

I dislike anyone who is:

1) Anti-sentimental

2) Anti-romantic

3) Anti-nostalgic

4) Anti-hype. (Unless it's hype about something intrinsically bad.)

5) Anti-craze. (As above.)

UCD Church on a Winter's Evening

 

Stephen's Green Shopping Centre this Christmas

A photo I snapped, forgot about, and then discovered weeks later. I have it as the backdrop of my computer now!

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.