Two poems about soap

In my last or second-last year at Mountjoy School, that is, around the age of fifteen or sixteen, I wrote some poems in my jotter on the subject of soap. I am surprised to find I still remember them.

Sope—the magic word again
Gives me hope of sopehope
And sohope I cope in hopucopusope

Peter Pope picked up a bar of sope
This, says Yaya, is purity and hope

(The last line refers to Gerard Hoffnung’s Punkt Kontra Punkt, where two German musicologists discuss a piece of twelve-tone music by ‘Bruno Heinz Jaja’. One of them says he ‘never attempted, like some of the Frrrrrench composers, to use thirteen tones. This, says Jaja, is the Baker’s Dozen—the Nadia du Boulanger.’ Ah, Hoffnung!)

Poem no 2
If I were a bar of soap
I’d fight the germs with all my scope
And I know that I could cope
For germs are seen with microscope

In the washroom people grope
Inside their bags for bars of soap
And will they be discouraged? Nope!
For people fill them up with dope
Proclaiming the delights of soap

Ruby anniversary

This weekend we celebrate forty years. That is something.

From the happy day I met you
I made a bet that I was going to get you
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, will you be mine?

The Beatles

I had to go into town today and buy myself the newly-remastered Beatles CDs.

I was just the right age to catch the mania; I turned 15 in 1963. The first song I heard of theirs was Please Please Me, and I remember where: in the sixth form room in Mountjoy School, on a tinny transistor radio. I was interested to hear a variant on ‘do-re-mi-fa’ as a bridge to the subdominant. Pop music was utterly stuck in formulas at the time. American pop meant Elvis, plus Dion and the Belmonts and Bobby Darin, and English pop meant Cliff, plus Billy Fury and Adam Faith.

I couldn’t believe on that first hearing that the Beatles were English, white, only four, playing their own backing, and writing their own songs. I was learning piano and had decided to educate myself by listening to bass lines, and suddenly here were bass lines from Paul McCartney that went somewhere. In all other bands the bass just plodded, but Paul took it by the scruff and twirled it around a bit.

Coming up to the next Valentine’s Day I wrote amorous doggerel in prep, as we did:

My name isn’t Ringo, or John, George, or Paul
And I’m not the swingingest guy of them all
But if you will love me the way I love you
My heart it will beat and the beat’ll be true

In vain to you I whispered
Please please me, love me do
In vain I sent you letters
With love from me to you
Then someone said ‘She loves you’
That made me twist and shout
And now I want to hold your hand
Whenever we go out

To think I have remembered those. Well well.

It would be decades before it struck me that the Beatles’ name refers to Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets.

Raglan Road

The last line of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘On Raglan Road’ is

When an angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

A curious image: an angel losing his wings as punishment for, or at least as a result of, material attachment.

The poem was written in 1946, the year the film It’s a Wonderful Life came out. In the film, George Bailey (played by James Stewart) is saved from suicide by an angel called Clarence who needs to do a good deed in order to earn his wings.

The idea of an angel earning his wings is presented as a piece of lore, but how old was the tradition? In the eighth century BC, angels simply had wings—six each, in the year that King Uzziah died: with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly (Isaiah 6).

The honorific awarding of wings began in the US armed forces during the First World War: winged aviator badges were issued to Air Force pilots and Army and Navy aviators. In Britain the Royal Flying Corps, which preceded the RAF, also had winged badges at least as early as 1912, and pilots still graduate by being ‘given their wings’.

Pet Hates (no. 2)

“Excellent choice, sir.”

There is something unsettling in being congratulated on a purchase by the vendor.

“You must be keen to get it off your hands—on second thoughts I’ll have something else.”

Les Paul

Les Paul died last week at the age of 94.

He invented the solid-body electric guitar when he was 26; he called it ‘the Log’, as the essential feature was a block of 4×4 timber with a Gibson guitar neck attached. He stuck bits of an Epiphone body onto the sides of the log, for comfort and looks, but that didn’t affect the sound. The main thing was not to have a resonating body: the pickups should be static while the strings did the vibrating. He had experimented with strings and a pickup attached to a railway sleeper in 1937, and his comment was ‘You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding.’ Nigel Tuffnell pays his homage in Spinal Tap to a Gibson Les Paul guitar. The sustain! Listen to it!

I brought my first guitar with me when my Dad brought us on a trip round the States in the summer of 1962; I was fourteen. The first place we stopped for the night was a trailer park just outside New York, across the river in New Jersey. Right next to our ground-breaking camper van (Louise) was a shiny silver caravan (trailers, they call them) where a man was playing tasty licks on an electric guitar. I wandered over and hung about, and he introduced himself as Andy Nelson; I introduced myself as Worm. Andy was a Gibson representative: his job was to go round the States demonstrating guitars and taking orders. His wife was with him, and they invited us all over for drinks. She was sad because her bottle of crème de menthe had fallen over and spilt in the cupboard.

Andy said he was going the next day to see his friend Les Paul. It’s Less, he said, not Lez, because it’s short for Lester. I had heard Les Paul and Mary Ford on the radio: Put a ring on my finger, in their trademark multi-tracking style, was a hit from 1958. Andy, or Mrs Andy, said that Mary was a true angel, she had saved Les repeatedly from drink and depression. He asked me would I like an autograph, so I said yes, and he came back the next day with a big shiny black-and-white photo of Les and Mary, signed to ‘the Worm’ and urging me to keep up the guitar playing. I may still have it, though I can’t think where: my one and only star autograph.

I polished up

The handle on the big front door.

Magic beans

Our beans on the 22nd of May . . . and today, the 27th of June

Leaning on a lamp post

I spent some of last weekend hanging posters for the Green Party. That is how I first got political: in 1989 myself and the Prairie volunteered, and we went out with John Gormley putting up posters that said something like “Others promise the moon . . . only we can save the earth”.

This time I was putting up the likeness of Senator Déirdre de Búrca, who is standing for the European Parliament. I put up 30 around Marlborough Road, Sandford Road, Eglinton Road, Donnybrook Road and Ranelagh. I felt great afterwards; it’s a pleasant challenge calmly wrestling with plastic boards and cable ties, and every lamp post has its peculiarities.

As I sized up a location in Ranelagh, the following started singing itself inside my head to the tune of Old Smokey; other verses followed over time:

On top of Eoghan Murphy
Or maybe below?
On top of Eoghan Murphy
Is where we will go

Now Tubridy’s spotty
And McCartan is smooth
Half way up a lamp post
You’ve intimate views

On top of my ladder
I’m holding on tight
I’m not really on for
Hang gliding tonight

When the wind takes my posters
They fly round the town
I’ll try again later
When the breeze has died down

O Déirdre de Búrca
If only you knew
The lengths people go to
To publicise you

Smoot

Using Sibelius music notation software, I work under the name of Smoot Scoring as a music typesetter and editor.

Nobody has ever asked me what Smoot means, but I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s a word I came across in Chambers, during one of our daily Scrabble games.

“A compositor who does odd jobs in various printing houses. — vi to work in this way. [Origin obscure].”

Chambers is the best dictionary for Scrabble because it is the most inclusive. Shorter and Concise Oxfords are shockingly exclusive: my Shorter Oxford has no entry for futon, and declines to mention euphoria. Why should we suddenly burst into Greek, when there is the perfectly good English word euphory? And yet it includes euphrasia and euphonia. The ways of Oxford are certainly ineffable; useful as an arbiter of correctness.

I wrote to the OED over two matters: they acknowledged my input but didn’t put it in. The first was their ridiculous attribution of the neologism grotty to John Burke instead of Alun Owen. Owen wrote the script of A Hard Day’s Night and tried the experiment of getting a phrase to catch on by putting it in George Harrison’s mouth. He was so kind as to get George to explain it:

“Grotty?”
“Yeah, grotesque.”
“Make a note of that word and give it to Susan.”

Oxford are dedicated to printed sources, however (at least for words that entered the language after the invention of printing) and although the celluloid record predates the print version, it was Burke who had the job of novelising the script.

My second letter to Oxford was about the phrase ground-breaking. Their sources for the figurative sense (doing pioneer work) date back only to 1709, ignoring the musical sense, which was surely in mind when people first used the phrase. It takes musical skill and knowledge to break a new ground. Christopher Simpson’s Book The Division-Viol was published in 1659 with plentiful instruction and examples:

There are other musical etymologies missed in OED, notably full stop meaning a full chord on a lute, which gave its name to the dot at the end of a sentence. They cite Shakespeare as the first to use the name full stop to mean the punctuation mark, but this is an unnecessary presumption. The reference, if it was not established yet as naming the punctuation, would have been taken by the audience as a musical one: “Come, the full stop.” (Merchant of Venice.) I didn’t come up with that observation, José Vázquez passed it on to me.

Smoot was quite likely originally someone’s name: names are what you get when you google it. At one time to smoot was an illegal pursuit—hey, rhyme alert! Limerick on the horizon!