Once they’d stepped out on to the roof of Liberty Hall, Jeff and Mutt (JAM), as programmed, broke into a, erm, jam session.
A fail-safe dodge specially designed to practice their scales, memorise the lyrics of their Second Song, the one penned and sung by Sam of the Pyrrhic victory, get their miked-up movements into sync and prevent the other from either falling or being pushed over the brink.
Mutt’s inner hack too got his comedic mojo back into motion for the between-songs patter from Paddyland as a sudden gap had suddenly appeared in the global stand-up scenario.
With the sad news of funny Freddie Starr being suddenly found seriously dead in far off sunny Spain. Already Mutt had instructed the editor of The Unionist Times to be ready with the following headline for the sages to cap his weekly Homily from the Pulpit next Tuesday. This is the week day to which his name is well and truly, erm, welded.
-Finchley Fintan ate my Crocodile !
It was almost as if he’d had a premonition of the soon-to-vanish Freddie’s being laid to rest in his cold beddy of Spanish clay, not only the best ever Scouse comic but the best never to bring the full- house down in Dongal Town, having failed to turn up in The Diamond there,, oh, say, a score or more years ago.
Was there ever a greater instigator of belly laughs than old Fred’s take on Onkel Adolf in turned-down wellies? Excepin’ perhaps, y’all, the impressive turning of his lower lip up into a pelvis during his legendary knee-trembling impresh of Elvis.
For last Tuesday the elder welder of East Brit baiting (alleged) Mutt the rasher-eating Brit Basher (supposedly) delivered one of his most memorably knee-slapping odes in his most recent mode as the Lapdog ‘biting’ Bulldog (purported).
–HISTORY of IRELAND and ENGLAND desrves better than EGREGIOUS NONSENCE.
Irish history appears to be a mystery to much of Britian’s intellectual elite.
Mutt was referring to a mysterious madame who seemingly wins muliple medals for peddling E.N. about the 18th C.E.N. back when Blightly was even then wont to meddle in Potato Blightly Land.
(This is Mutt, whose stage name as a funny man is 4F, gargling his throat in preparation for his Second Song Syndrome, with:
–Ar Éirinn ní neosfainn cé hí.
Translation:
-I wouldn’t name her for all the back-slapping from my fellow hacks in the Times of the Thames.)
–The book is very good so I will spare the author’s blushes and not name her. It’s a study of British culture in the 18th century and it has just recently appeared from one of the most prestigious academic publishers in the English-speaking world. The writer is a senior lecturer in 18th-century cultural history at one of England’s best universities.
The book itself is dazzlingly erudite, the work of a top-of-the-range scholar. And here is the sentence that made me dizzy: ‘The Act of Union in 1707 united Scotland with England, which by that time also included Wales and parts of Ireland’
And this why the pointed head of Mutt, in his waggish gagster guise as 4F, has already been the recipient of not less that (gasp) Eleven honourary doctorates from some of DUPlin’s best Universities for his dizzying, dazzling academic achievemnts as one of O.E.’s I.E., i.e, Occidental England’s Intellectual Elite for failing.
For Finchely Fintan of the Fuckáil Focal’s Fianna Failing indeed, to retain one single solitary focal or fada of Leprechaun despite the worse efforts of the compulsory teanga torturers/ meas murderers in the mini-Belsen of Crumlin CBS over the course of Aon bhliain fhada déag / Eleven long years. To? To stuff it down his guff-resistant throat.
–Yell, son, the compulsory Irish, or ye’ll go to hell, son !
For this a-stonishing academic achievement, in his vaunted attainment of fluency in flaunt-worthy ignorance across the only English-only speaking world:
Me-as.
Re-spect.
A pause now at Limerick Junction/ Sos anois ag Stáisiún Acomhail Luimní.
BÁS na STAIRE
Freddie Starr faoi ndear an t-uafás fnarr
Fuair sé bás uaigneach i bhfad thar lear
D’fhogair Francis Fukuyama
An Stair marbh le méaldrama
Mharaigh na meáin Stair in Éirinn go mear.
It is, gan dabht, a Continuity Sticky thingy to forget the Tally-stick and its slap-happy role in Occidental England in Das obligatorische Englisch der Hausfrau von Schloss Windsor.
The contemporary Tally-stick is, mar is eol do chách le réalta na Staire ina shúile, the instrument of choice for, erm, weaponising the mandatory medium of communication in the neo-Orange Free Stateen, the soon to be only English-only stateen in the EU. It is a sharpened Faber-Castell tally-stick, dipped in invisible ink.
Jeff, who is almost as good at predicting live births from a long way off as Mutt is at the soothsaying of sudden deaths, abruptly broke off from the (gulp) roof-top JAM session to point in a wee northerly direction. Towards a football stadium, where a, (gasp) roof-top MARMALADE session was held in the not too distant past.
-Is yon where wee Harry and Megan (known affectionately and collectively as Hommy by burly UDR vets in the purliues of loyal Tommy-worshipping Lisburn) were given the VIP treatment last year?
What prompted this of course was the Divine Balance of the glad with the sad, a Birth with a Death, which the United Queendom witnessed last week. .
This was the signal for erudite Mutt to right away unzip his million-word-a-mo mouth, the better to give vent to the Highest IQ in the UQ from the roof-top of Liberty Hall.
-That, Jeff, is Jurrasic Park where the Dinosaurs disport themselves with their palaeontological pastimes, pal, called Bogball and Stickfighting.
-Oh, och, aye, rightly so, Mutt. And to think it all started off so promisingly, in Jones Road a hundred years ago or mo. In the business of keeping empirically up with the Joneses upon whom the sun never set, with the real sport of target practice for the Tommies on each and every bleddy Tuesday.
-Sundays. You’re thinking, Jeff, of my whatchamaycallim column in The Unionist Times.
-Surely.
Mutt then placed a reassuring paw on the left epaulette of Jeff, adding:
-But with the Advent of DUBlin as the neo-capital of the Leo-capitalist Orange Free Stateen/ Occidental England, Jeff, these bloody pastimes of Bogball and Stickfighting will soon, very soon. What? And with the corgi-yelping help of this shoneen sports media of ours on sniffy Liffeyside to Bah-humbug the GAH in an ongoing orgy of blissful diss, be, happily, a plaything of the past.
Modesty, of couse, also forbade Mutt, top of the roof scholar, from mentioning the tune which failed to get play time even as Harry and Megan were escorted across the sacred sod of the turftrotting slurry-tankers of the Bog-oak Moonolight. Because (os íseal, led thoil) of an understanable desire, no doubt, to spare the blushes of his own making.
(No, that toon wasn’t : Och, Donaldson, where’s yer troos, we can see yer wee Toole !).
But, rather:
–Bean an Fhir Rua / The Red-haired Man’s Wife.
If the dazzlingly ignorant Mutt (to the point even of dizziness itself) had bothered to absorb even the most minimal amount of the Leprechaun by osmosis itself (Osmosis O’Toole, anyone?) then Mutt the Erudite might have been able to upskill Jeff on trills from the County Tyrone in the 18th C.
Thus, modesty also, perforce, forbade the monolgot Mutt, WB, of course, from quoting from WB
Yeats:
At the end of the last century there lived in the town land of Prillisk, in the parish of Clogher, in the county of Tyrone, a farmer named Carleton. Among his neighbours he was noted for his great memory. A pious Catholic, he could repeat almost the whole of the Old and New Testament, and no man ever heard’ tell of Gaelic charm, rann, poem, prophecy, miracle, tale of blessed priest or friar, revelation of ghost or fairy, that did not already lie on this man’s tongue.
His wife, Mary, was even better known. Hers was the sweetest voice within the range of many baronies. When she went to sing at wake or wedding the neighbours for miles round would flock in to hear, as city folk do for some famous prima donna. She had a great store of old Gaelic songs and tunes. Many an air, sung once under all Irish roof-trees, has gone into the grave with her. The words she sang were Gaelic. Once they asked her to sing the air, ‘The Red-haired Man’s Wife’, to English words.
‘I will sing for you,’ she answered, ‘but the English words and the air are like a quarrelling man and wife. The Irish melts into the tune: the English does not.’ She could repeat many poems, some handed down for numberless years, others written by her own grandfather and uncle, who were noted peasant poets in their day. She was a famous keener likewise. No one could load the wild funeral song with so deep sorrow. Often and often when she caught up the cry the other keeners would become silent in admiration’.
-What’s that, Mutt?
-Crocodile tears.
There’s no stopping Mutt’s inner stand-up comedian the once he gets going, surely !
So, that’s why that gob-musical tune wasn’t played in Jurrasic Park: to wit, to woo, to spare the blushes of Prince Harry, whose cheeks are much given to the same shame-signalling blobs.
-Why ?
Interjected Jeff (he has yet to pronounce it the way it’s done by Joe Duffy aka Juff, the SDLP honourary consul in DUBlin – as Y)
– is yon stadium known as Croak Park.
Mutt, naturally, took this ceist in his best Coldstream-guardish stride,
-Barnaby Rudge.
-Eh?
-Prince Harry is the most renowned red-haired Englisch man since Barnaby Rudge.
(Mutt might have substituted this following wisecraic by fingersnapping it from the benches:
-Or indeed, since Red Collier of Royal Meath. But then, that was in a foreign country and long before what the funnier Forencsic Scientiests jokingly refer to as ‘Lady D.N.A..’ had been invented).
-Eh?
-Barnaby Rudge, who, like Harry, was a hogshead short of a casket of red wine, had a partner who perched on his shoulder, overseeing and commenting on his every move, from (gulp) yodelling up the valley to (gasp) holding the end product in his arms, valet-like.
-Eh?
-Yes, indeed. Barnaby Rudge’s partner was a raven. Hence Croak Park.
What Mutt, in all modesty did not bark, was that this comical bird’s patter was dominated by a canine-impresh, said raven being very keen to imitate the, erm, watch-dogs and other lapdogs of the neighbourhood..
-Bow-bow.
This stumped Jeff.
-Eh?
Elucidated the erudite Mutt:
-Get a grip, Jeff. Grip was the name of the raven, which so impressed Edgar Alan Poe he went on to baptise his poe-m, named The Raven, after/ for it. That was the bird which inpired him and not, repeat NOT, the raven which perched upon the shoulder of the proto-Provo, the stark-raving mad Cuchullain in that Centre of Excellence for Egregious Nonsence, the G-POe.
At this point, the encylopedic Mutt tenderly, openly and generously enquired of Jeff if he’d like to avail of the non-plastic PC po, prior to the actual performance of their second song. Adding, to the music of the Ulster urine, that Edgar Allan’s grand father hailed from the Ulster county of Cavan.
After Jeff had patted down his tartan kilt, he enquired:
-So, why wasn’t the wee wain, oops, bairn baptised Barnaby and not this arch-American, Archie?
Cue, enigmatic smile on the dial of Mutt.
-No surprise at all.
-Eh?
-Croak Park is the cue.
-Eh?
-Yes, specifically the Dickensian aspect of Croak Park. From the unfinished terrace, formerly known as Hill 16 but now officially known as The Edwin Drood Ridge to the hitherto Barnaby Rudge who bore a grudge relating to (nudge, nudge) human riots.
Jeff took Mutt to be in his funny 4F mode and responded accordingly.
-Pull the UDR one.
The enigmatic smile on the dial of Mutt seemed to have taken an enema for another one appeared even ere the former one had not quite yet disappeared:
-Hidings.
-Eh?
-Hidings in the context of Croke Park where Tyrone and Dublin (in pre- DUPlin dark days), are concerned.
-Eh?
Mutt then explained that while Tyrone had indeed suffered a hiding from Dublin last year, the table was turned this year when it was a more able Tryone’s turn to red-hand out a surprise hiding to Dublin. Papa Harte had taken a hint from Papa Haydn.
-Eh?
With preternatural patience, Mutt pawsed briefly, before continuing.
-Yes: don’t you see. Papa Haydn’s second London Symphony is popularly known as ‘The Surprise Symphony’. A reminder of the twin heritage of the Anglos and the Saxons. Papa Haydn, mar is eol do chách faoin cheol seo, penned the melody of the German National Tantrum, ‘Deutschlandlied’. Lied is right, for his melody was filched for that purpose. What goes around, Poes around.
Once more, Jeff, stuck for a more civvie reply, divvied out rote-like:
-Pull the UDR one.
Mutt ignored this complex verbal/military interventions, and continued:
-Sometimes in the opposite direciton. Take, f’rinstance, ‘Haydn’s Serenade’, For some reason, it comes as a, erm, surprise to some folk who wouldn’t know a pitch fork from a tuning fork, to discover this exquisite piece was not actually composed by Papa Haydn at all, at all.
-Eh?
–Nein. But by an admirer who worshiped the very sound that the prodigious Papa Haydn nighthawked upon. To the point even, of imitation itself. That would have been Roman Hoffstetter.
(What Mutt’s inner hack did not add here, possibly to save blushes, to wit, to woo, his own. was that Roman Hoffstetter was a Benedictine monk, and that would have entailed cutting the Hyper-Catholic some slack. Which wouldn’t do at all, at all in the tender, open and generous Orange Free Stateen of the T.O.G. Oak Monolith. What Mutt could not wheelbarrow out, sadly, down to (gulp) culpable amnesia, was that the Borrowed Clothes syndrome in evidence here, relates to the origin of the Leprechaun surname. The e-literate Hayden, is actually, O hÉideáin and so. is derived in turn from (gasp) clothes.)
-Eh?
-Are you with me?
A nonplussed Jeff retorted:
-Och, noo. Ye still haven’t told me why this arch-American Archie was chosen as a name. What has Archie Bunker got to do with the Royal and Ancient line of Windsor?
Cue, yet another (yawn) enigmatic smile from the prolix Mutt, whose very surname entitlees him to the same traditional signage as, say, a Pawn Shop.
-But can’t you plainly see, Jeff, that’s precisely why I’ve been at such pains to emphasise the enduring Anglo connection with the Saxon.
-Eh?
-Achie B. Bunker.
-What’s the bleddy B stand for, Mutt? Bald?
–Nein, nein.
-What, so?
-Achie Berlin Bunker.
TUILLEADH LE TEACHT: TO BE CONTINUED
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