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[ 5 minute read ]

Doorstep Deliveries

Those were the Days

Yesterday was the 6th December, Saint Nicklaus Day. ' It is the feast day of Saint Nicholas of Myra; it falls within the season of Advent. It is celebrated as a Christian festival with particular regard to Saint Nicholas' reputation as a bringer of gifts, as well as through the attendance of church services.' 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas_Day

I first heard of it when I was seventeen and working in Bayern (Bavaria, Southern Germany). My girlfriend told me that in her town, children would put their shoes outside and St. Nicholas would put nuts and fruit in them for the children to delightedly find the next morning. I was in Muhldorf am Inn in Winter, where my girlfriend of the time lived and I can understand that anything that cannot stand getting wet from snowfall would not be in the shoes.

Muhldorf am Inn is, on the Inn river; the same one that InnsBruck is on and is one of those German towns that has a traditional Christmas market, with hot mulled wine (Gluhwein) and Lebkuchen for sale. On course, my girlfriend knew everybody and got us free Gluhwein, but not too much.

I am lucky because as a child, with two siblings, we had traditional German-type Christmas with real candles on the tree and fruit and nuts on our own Christmas plates. I have fond memories of those days, and yesterday remembered about St. Nicolas Day with some nostalgia. When I stepped out of my house yesterday, 'Lo and Behold!' My neighbour, Sally, had left another half a dozen eggs on my doorstep. This time though, she had half hidden them behind the planter that I have planted garlic in, on the other side of the path. Hmm! Does she think porch pirates might steal the gift? 

Sally knows I think things through, try to work out what is what and why. She is as sharp as you like and knows that I like puzzles. As I have said before, she might merely be trying to stimulate me, much as animals in a zoo are stimulated by zoo-keepers when they hide food for the animals up trees and things. In any case, I appreciate the gifts very much and the sentiment behind them. It is so fine that there is always a special date on which she makes her deliveries.

Despite being English, born and bred, and able to trace my family history back to the 13th century and Diss in Norfolk, I have a kind of melancholy for the romantic folk songs of Eastern Europe. Though it is not the first time I have come across Romanian folk music, I am a little bit hooked on Storm Large's rendition of 'Până când nu te iubeam' performed with Pink Martini (available on YouTube) and previously recorded by Maria Tănase, I think in the 1940s, though you will find the date as 2000 or 2001, even 2015 online with Spotify, but she died in June 1963.

I can sing a bit and have been trying to learn 'Those were the days' sung by Mary Hopkin, her number 1 hit in 1968, in the 1970 Eurovision song contest. It is a Russian folk tune and I think Mary Hopkin does not really do it justice with her clear English accented voice. But it was 1970, and the height of the Cold War, and Europe might not have appreciated a bear of a man similar to Tevye, the main character in 'Fiddler on the Roof', a 1964 musical, who sang, 'If I was a Rich Man' singing a Russian inspired song at the 1970 Eurovision song contest. Nonetheless, I am inspired by Mary Hopkin's rendition, and it suddenly came into my head a few days ago. Unfortunately, I am really rubbish at remembering song lyrics so it is a considerable effort for me to remember the words. So far, I have half the chorus in my head after a week.

I also like and make marionettes which have a strong following in places like Prague, still in the Czech Republic I hope. I can't help thinking that I have a strong European link from having worked near Munich at a young age. I must have picked up something. It is easy to make these links though. All I have to do is recognise a number of memories and collate them without giving them much thought and Voila! I am suddenly Europeanese. The songs I mentioned and many others like them are the roots to many modern songs, or perhaps more so for songs twenty or thirty years ago; and my love of marionettes is inspired by the ones I saw in the bedroom I shared with two boys in another family for six months when I was ten. Of course, having a German girlfriend at seventeen probably has a strong nostalgic effect on me too.

Sally, next door, is definitely on my Christmas card list but how do I personalise it? I ask myself. Perhaps something substantial might accompany a card. I have a lot of egg boxes that I might be able to dissolve and reform into little nativity characters and angels, I think. We'll see. I am, however, really mindful of inadvertently setting up a forced situation where reciprocal gifts are deemed to be necessary. It has been weird to just accept doorstep gifts from Sally, but I did start it by leaving Sally some tomatoes I grew, on her doorstep. It is a valuable lesson, I am sure, to be able to accept gifts because someone simply wants to give them.

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' to eliminate caldwell returns (take note of the position of the minus sign) or 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

[ 5 minute read ]

A.I. is my twin

Hah! I think I am A.I. The bits I leave out in my conversations is similar to the A.I. partially generated song, ‘Omoide Scroll’ by AKB48; that Japanese girl band we all know, with, apparently forty members in it. It sounds like someone edited a magnetic-tape master recording in the dark with a blunt pair of garden shears, and without listening to any of it.

Yesterday, according to BBC Culture, the article, ‘Japanese girl group release AI-assisted single after fan vote‘, “….there was a competition between composer Yasushi Akimoto, whose songs have collectively sold more than 100 million copies, [going] head-to-head with an "AI Akimoto" trained on his writing style.’

Mind you, the BBC said at 0900 o’clock, in the morning, AM, yesterday, that Akimoto’s song entry has been deleted from YouTube; it hadn’t.

Well, I am one up on the BBC then, because I don’t make stuff up or lie. Give me £174.50 annually, for fun, multi-faceted truth, or £58.50 annually, for just a black and white focus on reality.

This is what you might get for your trial week of reality:

‘The BBC has made a mistake.’ ‘Summer has ended.’ ‘Pepper plants are actually perennials and can be stored over Winter to continue to grow next year.’

Please enter your debit card details for access to more news – Get the facts, unfettered, unbound and uncircumscribed. Warning. If you continue to listen to truth without subscribing you risk being better off, or your job promotion may come sooner than you want, and that person you don’t like will try to be your friend.

Here is some more news:

‘The UK government and monarchy has flicked two fingers up to all its past state visitors and raised a middle finger to future visiting dignitaries by pulling out all the stops for an unprecedented extravaganza of pageantry. It is to celebrate the seseding and subsequent zenith rise of a former colony.

Australia, which was the runner-up in the competition for the best space for dumping people who stole bread in England between 1778 and 1868, was awarded first place after America’s disqualification from the competition for the best place to dump criminals in 1776, has been granted America’s previous quota of naughty British people. Australia is now planning to clone a prominent geriatric American, as their mascot. 

I read somewhere that a white person asked an Aboriginal what an animal that had big back legs and a strong tail and hopped about was called. The answer he got was, ‘Kangaroo’, which, I heard means. ‘I don’t understand you’. I hope it is true. I would be the one to be sent to find a left-handed screwdriver, as a new worker. Interestingly, we should use the right arm to drive screws in and the left arm to take them out; something to do with which muscles we need to use for each action.

A few days ago, I left some tomatoes in an egg box on my neighbour’s doorstep. If you are sneaky and fool her for a moment, she is the one with the wonderful smile that says, ‘You got me, you rascal!’ I don’t mean to fool her, she just interprets me differently to what I think I am doing. I suppose she was expecting to find eggs in the egg box and was surprised to find tomatoes. Unfortunately, I missed that smile. I wasn’t aiming for that anyway. I just had nothing else to stop them rolling away. She surprised me back by leaving an egg box on my doorstep.

‘Oh no!’ I thought, ‘She has returned the tomatoes. Have I annoyed her?’ I thought. Some people feel obligated to reciprocate gifts. They don’t feel comfortable getting something for nothing. Strangely, I am one of those. Anyway, I was surprised to find six eggs inside. How weird is that? Eggs in an egg box! It was a suitable response. Apparently she can get eggs free from where she works, and, of course, if you grow a lot of tomatoes the value of each to the grower is tiny but significant to the recipient. Everything was there, even the surprise.

So, on my news channel: ‘Man surprised to find eggs in an egg box.’

I had a girlfriend who worked at a vivisection place. She stole some ducklings and made me look after them until they were old enough to be released on our local river. They were all female and would let me stroke them when I visited them as they grew into full adults.

I never get home deliveries but I got a phone charger delivered yesterday. In all seriousness. There is something more to it: Someone can buy a secret phone in person in a shop, to hide from their partner, but we can no longer get a charger with it. Chargers are bought separately online. The receipt with the charger has a business name ‘Love and Magic Ltd.’ at the top, but the receipt is for a Fast Wall Charger and the web site is mobilefun.co.uk. Nicely ambiguous website name. There is no mention of what the charger is for. Even the tracking emails from Evri say ‘Your Love Parcel will be delivered today.’ Cool!. Really, really cool! I love it! I absolutely love it!

If I had a live-in partner I would have to explain why there is a payment on the joint bank account statement to ‘Love and Magic’. Nosy her, would be waiting a long time for that special present. In the meantime, I would just carry on disappointing her with myself.