Too-ral li-ooral li-addity

I've been thinking about Botany Bay recently.

For some reason I started singing it about two days ago, and for some reason I actually sang it right for the first time in my life. It was like an epiphany. Have you ever done something one way your entire life, tried to do it differently on a complete whim and realised that's the way you should have been doing it all along?

And yet, I realise now that I've had the wrong idea about the song because every version of it I've ever heard was also wrong, as were the music teachers and primary school teachers who would get us to play the tune in class many long years ago.

Why, just this morning, when I finished my baritone horn lesson (receiving, not giving) I walked into another class room where the teacher was telling her class to play Botany Bay with "swashbuckle", and immediately launched into what I'd called an oom-pa-pa version of the tune to illustrate what she wanted.

It's the same way I was taught. Instead of "too-ra-li oo-ra-li addity" (or tooral liooral liaddity, as I've seen it written) being the sort of lovely lilting sound most songs with "too-ra-li" type lyrics are given, it may as be "oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa oom-pa-pa".

I don't know how, or when, or why, but Botany Bay has been decreed some sort of up-tempo drinking song, and is invariably performed with the gusto usually given to Blow the Man Down and the kinds of sea-shanty you'd sing in the pub after a hard day's work.

Maybe that's the way it was originally performed all those years ago when it started out as a number in a musical burlesque (Little Jack Sheppard), but there are usually soft quiet songs in burlesques as well as the more up-tempo numbers - and when it was adopted as a folk song, it should have taken on the charm of its own lyrics.

Besides, it's not a shanty. It doesn't have any of the qualities of a sea-shanty, and it shouldn't be treated like one. I think it's a ballad. If you look closely it's this lovely, lilting, I'm-miserable-and-I-want-to-go-home ballad.

I mean, think about it, it's a song about poor, weak, lonely, depressed convicts - sent on the boat-ride from hell to the other side of the world, knowing that the odds they'll get home alive are very slim, and all because they mugged a guy and stole something small and meaningless.

If you take a walk down the streets of Campbell Town in Tasmania, you can read some of the crimes convicts were deported for, and how long they were banished from their homes and families. The crimes were things like stealing shoes or food (sometimes more serious crimes like sheep stealing and the like), and the sentences were anywhere from seven years to life.

The trip from England to Australia took more than six months on their fastest ships (which weren't usually used for transporting convicts), and for the duration the convicts were locked in an area that was dark, damp, lice infested and putrid with the smell of their own body-waste. Food was less than basic - and often filled with weevils and other insects. Many died on the journey. All came off the ships covered with sores and riddled with illnesses.

Sure, it was written years after the whole convict thing was over, and it may have written for the amusement of people who probably thought convicts were terribly funny - but it still seems like cry from the heart from lonely, downtrodden, desperate men and you loose all of that if you sing it with too much gusto. It should not be sung (or played) with the kind of happy frivolity one would hear from Blow the Man Down. It's a song of pain and misery, and should be sung with the same kind of soft, gentle, lingering caress that is given to war ballads like Aura Lee.

You should sing it like you've been at sea for months, you're feeling homesick, and the rhythm of the ocean is making the boat sway in that way that would rock you to sleep if only it didn't make you want to throw up.

And yet, every time I've ever heard it played, the notes are clipped short instead of lingered on, the the tune is kept bright and up-tempo instead of gentle and soft. I don't know, maybe it's been that way all along. It just seems like such a waste. It should be pathos, rather than bathos.

I'd actually gone off the song because I found the "oom-pa-pa" nature of the tune a bit annoying and overly simplistic. As a lovely, "too-ra-li" ballad, though, it's really quite pretty.

I don't know why I started singing it like that the other day. I think it's because I had been humming the tune to Aura Lee earlier, and I was just in a ballad frame of mind.

Some of the verses don't quite fit with the "lovely ballad" concept of the song, but they can work and, alternatively, you don't seem to loose anything by dropping them. The song gains a lot by cutting to the heart of the remaining lyrics instead of playing it for 'yuks'.

Or maybe it's just me. But next time you feel compelled to sing the song, sing it slow and pretty. It feels good.

Two Screens

I've just borrowed an extra screen to see if it would help with the whole stupid CMS conversion thing.

The answer is:

Yes, a lot. Makes me feel sad I didn't think of doing this months ago (actually, I did think of it, I just didn't think we had a screen to borrow).

Also, makes me feel a little bit like some kind of mastermind. Maybe not "evil mastermind", but perhaps "nefarious mastermind".

Mwah-hah-hah. And all that.

New Plan

I visited my grandmother again today. This is nothing terribly special or unique - I visit her everyday. Some days are more depressing than others, though, even though I'm not sure why. This was one of them, although it wasn't as bad as some have been.

Maybe it's the way she heard me come up behind her, thought I was a nurse and said, pitifully, "please help me", because she needed to go to the toilet and it had been some time since she pressed the button but no one had come.

There's something about watching someone succumb to old age that just sucks. Their life sucks, and you get to live a sucky life vicariously through them. We shouldn't have to get that old. We shouldn't have to live past the stage where we can take ourselves to the toilet without asking someone to help us and hoping against hope that they help us in time.

We shouldn't have to live past the stage where we can walk, breath and eat without feeling as if we've run an ultramarathon. Life shouldn't get to the point where the basic living of it is beyond us. Not if people are going to insist we keep on living.

If not for the marvels of modern medicine, my grandmother would have died years ago. She would have died with a lot more dignity than she has the way she's living now, and she wouldn't have had her world shrink on her so much for so long. It's been years since she has actually enjoyed life, and now she actively hates it. But she's still alive. All because we take her to the doctors when she gets sick, and the doctors find a way to stop her from dying from whatever sickness she has.

It's not their fault. We simply live in a society that has forgotten what death is for. We think life is vitally important, so we go out of our way to make sure people who shouldn't really be alive manage to stay in the game. Babies that would once never be conceived/never be born/never survive past the first few nights/never live past the age of five are now making it through childhood - even though they might not do it very well. Adults who would once have died while still with some quality of life after some illness or accident are now living long enough to see the quality drain away - and then go on living a few years more.

We weren't meant to live forever. Some of us weren't meant to live very long at all. It's sad, it's tragic, but it's life. Death is a part of life. It defines it, puts it in perspective and keeps the living honest. Yet, we try so hard to avoid dying, even when living isn't really the best thing we could do - for ourselves or for those around us.

But how do you die in this society, in this day and age? We're trying to stamp out death by natural causes and no one approves of death by intent. In the olden days, you'd get sick and die. That was reasonably normal. These days, you don't go down without a fight - even when winning the fight would actually be more like loosing. And when you do die, everyone says it should never have happened and tries to find way to stop it happening to others. We've lost the concept of a good death.

Except when it comes to our animals. We're quite happy to put our dogs out of their misery, but not our parents. They get to stay miserable (apparently it makes us all feel better).

I've been joking with some of my friends who have parents and grandparents in similar situations - saying I don't want to get that old, so after a certain age I'm just going to live recklessly and hope I get taken out in a motorcycle accident or something.

The problem with that plan is I'm likely to get "saved", so I'll be old and suffering from permanent damage that will stop me from base-jumping or engaging in other death-inviting activities.

I thought of a new plan today: Exposure. I've been reading a magazine on trail running and it mentioned things to do to avoid catching hypothermia and dying of exposure. It made me think of the RSPCA's recommendation for killing cane toads - putting them in the freezer. Apparently, their temperature drops gradually, they fall asleep and freeze to death in blissful ignorance. (Why they honestly think that anyone who isn't going to dissect a toad is going to bother catching them and putting them next to their steak and lamb chops is beyond me. I think they might be delusional).

From what I think I know about hypothermia and dying of exposure, it's a similar pattern. You get really, desperately, uncomfortably cold for a few hours, then you start to nod off. Once you fall asleep, if help doesn't get to you soon, it's all over bar the coroner's inquiry.

That doesn't sound like a bad way to go, all things considered. Find a beautiful spot somewhere really cold (Arctic Circle, perhaps), go for a nice, long bush walk in the middle of winter, make sure you've got enough supplies to get far enough away from civilisation that no one will come along and try to save you, and let nature take it's course. Sure, you'll probably end up being eaten by something - but at least then you're giving something back to the planet, I suppose. Circle of life and all that.

Beats dying slowly because people insist you should be trying to stay alive.

So, yeah, that's my new plan: Live a rich and full life for as long as I can and face old age as valiantly as I may until I feel I've jumped the shark and it's time to go. Then I'll take myself out into the woods somewhere (if there are any left by that time) and die of exposure. Hey, they say wild animals do it all the time, so it must be reasonably civilised.

Of course, I may change my mind by then - it may be quite a number of decades away.

How would you like to die?

Happy Place

Fancy that.

According to a survey by the World Values Survey organisation (a US funded body), Estonia is the 84th happiest country in the world.

They should put that on a T-Shirt.

Sure, someone could complain that 84th place in a field of 97 surveyed countries is a bit of a poor showing, but you have to admit, it sounds kind of cool:

Come to Estonia, the 84th Happiest Place on Earth...

Russian

So...

I'm learning Russian. I don't know why, especially since I'm at that stage with trying to learn Estonian (on my own) where I could probably quite easily confuse myself, but I found a Russian teacher and I figured I should try to learn at least one language with professional help.

Why Russian and not, say, French or Spanish?

I don't rightly know, exactly.

I always felt that if you were going to learn a language you should learn one that could be used in a wide number of countries. I refused to learn Japanese when I had the chance because it was only spoken in Japan. I studied Indonesian in school, but largely because that was the only language on offer. I didn't feel the need to pursue it with any vigor as Indonesian is only spoken by Indonesians (and not even all of them). All I can really remember from those lessons is saya tidak mengerti, which means "I don't understand". A little bit useful, but not much.

And yet, here I am, trying to learn Estonian, which is spoken by less than two million people. Why? Because I refuse to have an Estonian passport and be entitled to help from the Estonian embassy if I've never been to Estonia and I can't even speak the language. So I'm trying to learn Estonian and I'm planning a trip to Estonia next yet (just a holiday this time, but with a view to moving there for a year or so in the foreseeable future).

Learning Estonian is, of course, ridiculous. It's ridiculous for exactly the same reason that learning Finnish would be ridiculous. Why try to learn one of the hardest languages on the planet when:

a) only a small group of people speak it,
b) everyone who speaks it also speaks at least one other language - any one of which would be much easier to learn,
and
c) the native speakers have a reputation of having little patience for people who haven't got a complete grip on the language, and can speak your language so much better than you could ever hope to speak theirs?

Plus, the language itself is ridiculous. I'm sorry, but it is. You don't need fourteen cases - especially if you are also going to have prepositions and postpositions. You do need gendered pronouns and articles. Whoever invented the Finno-Ugric languages was a bit like one of those sociopaths who lock up abandoned children in the basement and only speak to them in a series of complicated grunts. I'm almost convinced it was some sort of twisted sociological experiment that has gone on for far too long.

That said, it's so darn pretty to listen to that I can't wait until I understand enough words well enough to hear the meaning behind the poetry. Plus, the fact that it is such a challenge makes me feel strangely victorious whenever I've managed to wrap my head around part of it.

Which leads me to Russian. Okay, it's spoken by more people in more places than Estonian (including Estonia), but a heck of a lot of the non-Russian countries which used to speak it try to avoid it like the plague these days. It will probably help me read a few signs and talk to a few shopkeepers in certain quarters of Estonia, but if I'm not really planning on visiting Russia, and the Estonian speakers would have more respect for me if I spoke French, why learn Russian?

I think its partly because, when I was growing up, Estonia was part of the USSR, and, in the 1980s, the USSR was kind of cool. That was where all the best Bond villains came from. That was where the best competition came from in the Olympics. That was where all of the really cool scientists and artists defected from. The USSR, in the 80s, had a strange attraction for a young kid who read comics and watched action films. Every time you heard about a ballet dancer, gymnast or chess master from an Eastern Block country taking out some big honour, something in the back of your mind would register: "Eastern European countries rock".

That was all tied up with Russia. Knowing very little about Estonia, thanks to my grandmother's more-or-less total assimilation into the Australian culture, every time I learnt something new about Russia or any of the other countries in the USSR, I also felt as if I was learning more about Estonia. After all, it was a member of the Eastern Block...

Even though I have now spoken to enough ex-pat Estonians to know that they don't particularly like Russia, Russian or anything to do with the Russians, something deep down inside of me still feels that learning Russian somehow gets me closer to my Eastern European roots. And, even though Russia itself is now a bit boring and slightly obnoxious, the part of me that grew up during the last hurrah of the Cold War still finds something strangely alluring about it all.

Plus, it comes complete with a new alphabet. The part of me that always loved finding new letters and working out their names and pronunciations is completely over the moon. I mean, I used to amuse myself during boring lectures by translating words into phonetic symbols, so this is just great.

One of these days I'm going to learn French and Spanish, too, but right now it's Estonian and Russian. That will do for the present, I think.

Hunky Dory

Memo to self:

Must not use idioms like "every thing's all hunky dory" when talking to people for whom English is not their first language...

Heck, I can even think of some native speakers who would have trouble with that...

The Electric Uno Motorcycle

Not a motorised unicycle, but it looks like one from the side, which is kind of cool:



Not bad, for an 18 year old inventor. More info here.

Hope the guy gets his investors. Can't see it really replacing cars and 'real' motorbikes outside of the busy city centres, though.