Finnginn's Festive Countdown: Number 7

Calypso music is unashamedly joyful music - so it’s a shoo-in for adding some sunshine to your Xmas playlist. And luckily Calypsonians love Xmas so there’s albums of the stuff out there to choose from. 

Calypso music is also unashamedly subversive music - stemming from the musical tradition of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean using call and response work songs to mock their slavemasters. 

Number 7: Father Christmas by Lord Kitchener

Lord Kitchener is referred to by Wikipedia as Lord Kitchener (calypsonian) to make sure nobody accidentally confuses the grandmaster of calypso for the moustachioed face staring out of the “Your Country Needs You!” First World War recruitment poster.

Be sure to check out his back catalogue. Lord Kitchener knows all the tricks in the calypso lyric handbook - sociopolitical commentary, humour, double-entendre, the experience of being black in a racist world - all set to beautiful calypso music which is a uniquely Trinidadian fusion of African beats and Latin-American rhythms. 

According to his obituary in the Guardian he arrived in England on the Empire Windrush in 1948 and stayed here for 14 years - opening a nightclub in Manchester. 

“Last night you said to me what I want for Christmas?

Darling, it’s nice to see you are so generous.

Well, boy, take it from me your offer is welcome:

Bring the wine, the whisky and the rum!”

Finnginn's Festive Countdown: Number 8

Confession time: I love Xmas music. I’m not ashamed to say that the first 7” single I ever owned was Cliff Richard’s Mistletoe and Wine and that at least 50% of the theme of that chorus-line plays an important part in my Xmas celebrations to this day. 

I have two ideas that I think would improve the whole Xmas music experience for everyone.

1. Xmas music should only be played during Advent and on Xmas Day itself.
2. We should all deviate from the standard playlist a bit more - let’s hear more Xmas deep cuts.

For those who love Xmas music as much as me, and for all the grinches who wish they could avoid stepping into last Christmas everyday, I present Finnginn’s Festive Countdown.

Number 8: It’s Always Christmas Time for Visa by The Austin Lounge Lizards. 

There can be few genres more divisive than comedy gospel bluegrass. Let’s just say it’s not for everyone. 

I first heard the Austin lounge Lizards when I was working as a campboy in the United States in the late 90s. A Texan guitar slinger called Uh…Clem used to sing a cover of their song Monkey on My Back (And It Looks Like You) round the campfire at the Cotopaxi Smokehouse. When I returned to England, he gave me as a parting gift a cassette tape that had their album Employee of the Month on one side and a live album by the Asylum Street Spankers on the other.   

In the years since, I have tracked down some other records of theirs. Not much of their back catalogue has made it to the digital era. Only about half of their 10 or so albums are on YouTube Music.

Luckily one of them includes this catchy seasonal reminder that the credit card companies are out to exploit you…

Altogether now:

It’s always Christmas time for Visa!

Mastercard gets presents every day!

Our interest rate just went

To 29 per cent

Even though we’ve never failed to pay.

I'm always looking to expand my Christmas playlist, please share your favourites in the comments below or on Facebook.

Of Time and CBeebies

Jean Paul Sartre opened La Nausée with the observation that 3 o'clock in the afternoon is too late or too early for anything that you want to do. I've not got a problem with 3pm. And I totally disagree that you can't do anything at 3pm. I can think of lots of things to do in Norwich at 3pm, and Norwich isn't exactly Paris.

Maybe Sartre's mates all had proper jobs and weren't available to head down to the Left Bank for a quick café noir and a natter about existentialism in the middle of the afternoon? But surely he could just pop to the library and find an autodidact to sneer at?

Now consider 4.30am, that is a time that is definitely either too late or too early for anything that you might want to do. Let me tell you. And I have become recently well-acquainted with that hour due to the clocks being regulated by some kind of governmental diktat and my younger son's body clock being regulated by his desire to spoon in a bowl of Weetabix drowned in blue top as soon as his tummy rumbles.

The collective insanity that causes us all to reverse the minute-hands of our clocks a full rotation at the end of October has always bothered me. I have an early memory of asking my Nana to explain how the Sun knew to rise at a different time.

Baked a lovely Cornish pasty, my Nana, and was also ready to explain the basics of celestial mechanics when called upon. It's hard work being a Nana.

Carers of young children will already be aware that before CBeebies proper starts it's colourful assault on the senses, you get half an hour or so of Little Daydreams - lots of slow motion bubble blowing and jumping in puddles - all narrated by 2019 Best Actress Oscar winner Olivia Colman. But even the makers of Little Daydreams know that 4:30am is too early for a little auditory tactile synaesthesia - so they schedule that to start at 5:30am.

If he's allowed to choose what to watch while I aimlessly scroll through Twitter to see which government ministers are likely to resign in the coming parliamentary session, Ginger will inevitably opt for something from  the 'blocks' Universe. These are 5 minute cartoons about personifications of abstract concepts that sing and dance. 

So far the BBC has adapted the following philosophical concepts for the small screen:

• phonemes ("alphablocks")
• integers ("numberblocks")
• qualia ("colourblocks")

I know what you're thinking - there's a clear gap in the market there for generative syntax ("grammarblocks"?)! But don't worry, I have written to the commissioning editor of CBeebies to suggest this for the next series. I've even written some suggested lyrics for the theme song:

Grammarblocks! Grammarblocks!

Combine syntactically!

Grammarblocks! Grammarblocks!

They make syntactic trees!

'S' is comprised (minimally)

Of one 'NP' and one 'VP'.

Modifiers, Adverbials

And don't forget Recursive Rules

For linguistic infinity!

Grammarblocks! Grammarblocks! (et cetera)

I've yet to hear back. Anyhow it's time for a nap before the 3pm school run - Did I mention that I've been awake since 4:30?

Clocks Photo credit: Lucian Alexe on Unsplash

Young Finnginn with Nana photo credit: my mum?

Bedtime Blues and Clerihews

My younger son - to avoid confusion with the elder (Finn Jr), I'll call Ginn Jr (or maybe, Ginger?) - is at an age where he is changing his preferred method of falling asleep.

Until recently, the best way of invoking a nap involved strapping him into either a pushchair or a car seat and expending either leg or diesel power to trundle him into the land of Nod.

However, I'd noticed that my evening walks pushing the buggy around the streets of Mile Cross were getting longer and longer and the end result less certain. Sometimes I would complete the whole extended podcast edition of In Our Time and, whilst my knowledge of the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would be satisfyingly increased, the little one would still be pushing the hood of the buggy back to get a better look at the people smoking outside Mecca Bingo.

I don't think we're in Mile Cross anymore...

I downloaded a step counting app to give myself an idea of how punishing these evening walks were becoming. The week when I twice recorded 19,000+ steps, I decided a new approach was needed.

I recalled a method of getting a child to sleep that had briefly worked with Finn Jr at a similar age. This is where I try waiting until he is really tired and lying down in the dark next to him and hoping like hell that he drops off before I do. 80% of the time, this works and I can transfer him to the cot and sneak downstairs for a rewarding glass of Côtes de Gascogne. The other 20%, my wife has to wake me up to tell me I've missed Only Connect.

In an attempt to stave off the inevitable wave of drowsiness that lying down in a darkened room brings on, I like to compose clerihews in my head. (I expect that you'll recall from this 2014 Finnginn blog post that clerihews are four line whimsical biographical poems that don't have to scan and follow an AABB rhyme scheme.)

A new crop of government ministers has revealed a rich harvest of names crying out to be Clerihewed (clerihewn?). Here are three that I have remembered long enough to write down:

Kwasi Kwarteng

Took up a pen

And wrote down a tax-and-spend policy

That wrote off the UK economy.

Suella Braverman

Do me a favour, man?!

What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander:

Stick yourself on the next flight to Rwanda.

Goodbye, Liz Truss -

Gone by Christmas.

When Liz Truss sees the Christmas trees

She'll celebrate with a plate of imported cheese.

In the time I've taken to write and edit this, rumours have been circulating that Kwarteng has been sacked as Chancellor. You heard it here first!

In the interests of fairness, feel free to add your own clerihews about members of the shadow cabinet in the comments...

Notes on quitting smoking

Two years ago, perhaps a decade after the above photo was taken by my stepsister, I was convinced to give quitting tobacco a go - and I'm finally ready to talk about the experience.

There are two chief categories of ex-smoker that I encountered while bartending:

1. Those who secretly still love smoking - who will blag rollies off you when they are drunk and without their partner.
2. Those who apparently never really liked smoking in the first place and become vehement campaigners in the anti-tobacco lobby.

I think I am destined to be a category one ex-smoker. But here are my notes on quitting in case they are useful to anyone else thinking of sucking their final menthol tip.

The physical experience of quitting

Overcoming the physical addiction to nicotine has been made much easier by the invention of vaping. In the early days of quitting smoking, I was able to ease my cravings by vaping. Luckily, vaping is a thoroughly unpleasant experience and therefore much easier to stop.

When the battery was fully charged, the experience of vaping was like being at an amateur dramatics production of Macbeth when an over-eager stagehand gives the dry-ice machine full throttle. When the battery was low, the model I adopted was liable to malfunction and deposit a thin dribble of acidic vaping liquid into the mouth. 

I was able to give up vaping within a week (compare that to the smooth taste of delicious Golden Virginia, that had me hooked for a quarter century).

Some people seem to love vaping, so maybe I wasn't doing it right? Perhaps I lack the willpower to experiment with flavours and equipment to make it a proper habit. If so I might be the first person to give up nicotine through a lack of willpower?

The mental experience of quitting

I found it helpful to imagine there is a little compartment somewhere in the mind where you can put thoughts to ignore them. By definition, minds are mental phenomena, where the imaginary is real - so imagining like this is a feature that your mind possesses is sufficient to make it a feature that your mind possesses. Believing in your imaginary ignored memory compartment makes it real enough for our purposes.

Thus equipped, when your mind occasionally nudges: “Time for a lovely cigarette!”, you have a compartment ready to file away the thought. And you don't just have to use it for cigarette cravings - why not store your nagging regrets, resentments and anxieties in it too? Just make sure you seal it up really tight - don't want that lot leaking out on a random rainy Thursday hangover.

As you can see from this before and after, quitting smoking enables you to grow a fulsome moustache as you won't be setting fire to it trying to relight half-inch long rollies that have gone out. 

20/20 Hindsight, 10/20 Vision

I'm frequently distracted by the live feeds of unending crises. Since my last post here, we've had a Conservative election landslide, Brexit, global pandemic, war in Europe... and Liz Truss voted Prime Minister by a proportion of the electorate so small that I booked an appointment to get my eyesight checked at a local opticians' clinic just so I could see it. Turns out three years sat in a darkened room doomscrolling has left me a little myopic. 

An in-built desire to please/win makes me a terrible subject for eyetests. Five years ago, I went to a popular highstreet chain (that I'll just call GoggleGrafters). The optician conducting the tests did my good eye first. When he came to measure the problem eye, I remembered the sequence of letters and reeled them off perfectly.

This time I went to a friendly local independent clinic, the kind of place where they still make you a cup of tea while you're waiting to see the specialist, but also insist on you wearing a face mask so you're sort of left carrying a cup of tea around as the entropy in the room slowly increases. This optician had clearly met my type before - she did my bad eye first so I couldn't cheat.

One aspect of the examination not offered at GoggleGrafters (but thoughtfully included at my more recent test) was an explanation of my macular degeneration.

"Those bumps you can see on the right eye display are sun damage."

At some point in my childhood, I'd chosen to look at the sun and permanently damaged one of my eyes. I have no memory of this, but staring at the sun sounds like the sort of thing childhood me would have been sufficiently sensible and risk averse to attempt with just the one eye.

Once the lens strength appropriate for a solar-induced maculo-retinal deterioration had been determined, I was invited to inspect a selection of frames. 

"What did you have in mind?" 

I asked if they had something like the pair that Noam Chomsky wore for his 1971 debate on human nature with Michel Foucault. 

"What were you looking to spend?"

All that doomscrolling has left me with the distinct impression that there's a cost of living crisis on, so I hesitantly scribbled a suitably conservative (small-c) figure on a piece of paper.

"Ah... Perhaps you should have gone to GoggleGrafters?"

Header Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

Leaders Leaders Leaders Debate Debate Debate*

You're probably all familiar with the six demands made by the 19th Century parliamentary reform movement known as the Chartists. Four of them have more or less come to pass:

• Paid MPs
• Equal sized constituencies
• Abolition of the property qualification for becoming an MP
• Secret ballots

A fifth (universal male suffrage) has even been been surpassed, thanks to the direct action taken by the Suffragettes a century ago.

The final Chartist demand was for annual parliamentary elections. Be careful what you wish for...

Yes. It's election time again! As usual, the national discussion is starting with the big debate about which leaders should be allowed to take part in the big debates. 

Like the Xmas jumper (see Finnginn passim) the debates have an illusion of tradition but, in fact, they only started in 2010: when the incumbent Gordon Brown and challenger David Cameron spent the whole evening saying how much they agreed with Nick Clegg. 

In 2015, the Labour and Conservative leaders were in the same building but didn't debate each other, they each separately faced a grilling from the audience and Jeremy Paxman. The most memorable thing that happened was Ed Miliband managed to trip over stepping off the weird Q-shaped stage.

In 2017, the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May - who had been watching her poll ratings tumble each time she appeared on TV - bottled it completely and sent Andrea Leadsom in her place. This was the year when there were 9 party representatives on the stage. So each only got about 45 seconds of airtime that was mostly spent being interrupted by Nigel Farage.

So, tonight, as is traditional (but actually for the first ever time) the leaders of the two main parties in the United Kingdom will present their policies and their rebuttals of their opponents' policies to the nation. 

The reason that Chartists wanted annual elections was so that if politicians failed to deliver on their promises, the people could quickly replace them. 

If you are depressed about the state of politics today, and feeling low about the struggles ahead, have a listen to the Chartists' Anthem (as rendered here by Chumbawamba) and remember how far we have come:

*For an explanation of why linguists think the title of today's post (Leaders leaders leaders debate debate debate) works as a theoretically parsable sentence in English, see my blog post from five years ago: Ask Finnginn II: The Recursion Excursion.