not right

Golden Guitars, go stand in the corner and think about your behaviour. I frown upon you.

The shouldawon that didntwin (anything, unbelieeevably)? The hamster-cute very talented Peter Denahy, because aside from everything else, what encapsulates between guitar and piece-a-cake the eternal universal cycle like That Song? (oh, all right, yes, and banjo, but you might just have to get over it). If you haven’t heard it, quick, catch up with everyone else…

Sort of Dunno Nothin'

…because you were either that kid, or you dated that kid. My nephew will grow up to be that kid, and my mate’s daughters will grow up to date that kid… and the world turns.

(Incidentally, when will Peter Denahy start to age? Is he another one who’s got one of those hidden portraits knocking around?)

the lost verse

I heard an old, old song done to a very pretty tune on the radio this week. The pretty tune was a morris tune I can’t remember the name of, and the song was Sir Arthur – or Sir Arthur and Charming Molly (or even, “Mollee”, but I suspect if you’re going to go that far you might already have your fingers in your ear and your eyes closed, and don’t need anybody else’s input on the subject).

As is usually the case with pretty folk songs, you’re best not to listen to the words.

In short, Sir Arthur fancies poor-girl ‘charming Molly’ and offers her everything if she'll (heh, heh) love him. Molly says she'll never lie with a married man till his wife is dead, which if nothing else, is disarmingly honest.

Well, in some versions of the story, Sir Arthur waits seven years until his wife dies, and in other versions, he waits seven years till his wife ups and takes a lover, and then he's free to marry charming Molly, who becomes a lady. The moral: lucky poor girl gets what she wants – providing, that is, what she wants is to marry Sir Arthur, which to be honest isn’t all that clear – by standing firm, as outlined in the last verse:

Now charming Molly in her carriage doth ride,
With her hounds at her feet, and her lord by her side:
Now all ye fair maids take a warning by me,
And ne'er love a married man till his wife dee (or runs off with a lover, whichever)

This is all well and good, until you look at the verse tucked in the middle, just after Molly rejects Sir Arthur the first time:

'Oh, charming Molly, lend me then your penknife,
And I will go home, and I'll kill my own wife;
I'll kill my own wife, and my children all three,
If you will but love me, my charming Molly!'

YES. Now, credit where it’s due, he doesn’t kill his wife. He waits. Until she decides she’d rather go off with presumably just about anybody who isn’t plotting to kill her with a penknife.

What a catch.

Eternal worship to the ethnomusicologist who unearths the buried real final verse that nobody sings any more because the world of folk music is controlled by the bearded and the mad. I believe it has something to do with how, after the penknife comment, charming Molly gathers a bunch of her mates and warns them if they ever see that big freak Sir Arthur come within five mile of her again, they should run like dogs for the constable. I think she also tells the lass who milks the cows on Sir Arthur’s estate, in this same lost verse, that she should probably hie her up to the big house as soon as possible and warn the wife she’s married a dangerous lunatic, and she and the kids should get the frack out of there and go stay with her mum.

Alternatively, eternal worship to the songwriter who can come up with this infinitely better version.

the Hat redux

Janet has kindly set me straight on the multitude of reasons why my Harry Manx Hat version 1.0 isn’t working. I mean, she didn’t do it in a setting-me-straight way, because Janet is obviously quite nice. But her comment and website have helped me understand everything that's Wrong with my Hat.

The first and foremost reason is, I am not Janet. Dude, those are some extraordinary hats right there. The extraordinariness of those hats is something Peter Mansbridge should probably bring up on the National.

But they’re _woven_? You’re kidding me. I guess my nine-foot musician radius isn’t close enough to determine that pretty freaking vital fact.

One thing that became immediately apparent after my Hat was worn, oh, twice, was that it hasn’t got enough substance – it’s flopped and gone head-shaped. (I was at least right about the ‘tube with a round top’ thing though.) The flopping would happen with this quite loosely put-together knitted thing, over a more substantial woven thing. I was going for version 2.0 in some sort of much more tightly-knitted sock yarn, though now I may still have to rethink things. (local yarn shop sale tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Thank you, universe).

There appears now also to be the magic scratchiness element, that is to say, musician's preference for only scratchy wool. I tried really hard to avoid scratchy wool for the sake of the lovely and the bald. My Hat is 100% pure merino. (and it’s still itchy. I’ve looked for something softer but apparently they don’t make yarn out of pixie wings).

Now I hear scratchy wool is the Harry Manx thang. Shpff. Musos, eh?

While you wait for the exciting next chapter of the saga, go and check out Janet’s hats and straw bales and suchlike. They will delight you. They will do things for your soul. I suspect, in fact, they may be instrumental in the restructuring of modern Canada. These are some powerful hats.

booklust

So there’s been a lot of Work lately. In the bits where there wasn’t Work, there was Knitting, and getting Things knitted In Time for Things. It all conspired to create a certain leanness in the Reading area, such that one or two Advance Reading Copies may not, strictly speaking, be Advance any more. But Santa was generous to the lucky, lucky booky chick, and brought a definitive end to the drought. He started with this:







The Knife that Killed Me, Anthony McGowan

…and I grabbed it with wanton abandon and read it in an afternoon, so I could share it among my booky mates. I love how Santa in an international entity, because this can’t be got in North America, and yet! I still get to have a copy, and more importantly be the bringer of it to others.

The desperate edge taken off my appetite, I started on this:








Stargirl, Jerry Spinelli

Which, I realise, everyone whose job is YA books should’ve read actually years ago, and wish I had, but at least I got to it now.

But then, this – another one you can’t get here, or not in this format – took up a siren call from the bookshelf:







Diamond Dove, Adrian Hyland


(Be interesting to see what the North American ed. has done to this actually. Different cover, different title (Moonlight Downs). Anyone know what's been done to the words on the inside?)

Anyway I’ve slipped, and I started cheating on Spinelli with Hyland, who is quite magnetic, but you know what? I can totally juggle two, and neither needs to know about the other; it’s not fair to ask me to choose between them right now, because I kind of need them both for different reasons, and nobody’s getting hurt and I can handle it, so if you can’t be supportive and accept my choices then just get off my freaking back, okay?

But Hyland and Spinelli are paperbacks, and sometimes I need a sturdy hardcover that will lie flat on my knees while my hands are occupied knitting all the many new request items, and I promise you it was just once, and just casual, but I dipped into this:







The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness



I’m pretty sure I’m still in control, so long as Ness remains with the knitting pile and Spinelli and Hyland stay on the bedside table and don’t see.

Trouble is, I know Santa also dropped in on New Zealand, and I have it on good authority that these good-looking Kiwi specimens will shortly be knocking on the door and asking me out for a flat white, nothing implied, no strings, just to acquaint ourselves:

New Zealand Book of the Beach 2 and Best New Zealand Fiction 5

…and I don’t think I can say no.

best lines

For so very different reasons.

From Neil Gaiman, in The Graveyard Book (which you can hear him read aloud in full online at www.mousecircus.com)

‘At the best of times his face was unreadable. Now his face was a book written in a language long forgotten, in an alphabet unimagined.’

And then from Radio 2’s Mike Harding, about everyone bemoaning how The Folk Scene got too Professional and It’s A Shame:

‘Yes, I know it was a lot better when we all sang in folk clubs for nothing and knitted our own concertinas from recycled policeman's bicycles…’

Best lines you’ve read/ heard lately?

discoveries

Things Aunty Amber discovered this holiday

She discovered what she is best at:
Pushing swings for the longest time
Playing footy in the street for the longest time
Towing a toboggan uphill the most times

She discovered what she is not best at:
Anything that looks like actual mothering

She discovered the socks she knitted for her wee nephew have magical properties. They enable him to win at basketball AND football AND running AND table tennis AND fighting dinosaurs AND EVEN Ludo. More magical socks have been requested.

Finally, she discovered a kids’ TV show called Word Girl. Word Girl is a superhero whose superpower is - are you ready? - a really extensive vocabulary. The bad guy in Word Girl, clearly conceived of in the time-honoured drugged-out tradition of most children’s tv, is a butcher who shoots weapons-grade meat products out of his hands. He also makes grammatical mistakes, which Word Girl is always on hand to correct. Aunty Amber is finding herself a superhero costume as we speak.

What did you folks discover at the turn of a new year?