It’s funny peculiar and funny haha but Kevin Maher is back in “Times 2” today 27 July. His subject is SWIFT, not the late Dean of St Patrick’s, but TAYLOR SWIFT an American female singer who has sold 50 million albums, but meant nothing to him until she put on a Val Doonican cardigan.
I know the phenomenon, for I stopped listening to pop music when Elvis joined the US Army, and in a nostalgic mood went to see Fats Domino, with people of my own vintage (25 at the time).
A backing act took a long time vacating the stage though some of the Fats fans were crying “Get off, you bums!”. The group was called “THE BEEGEES”. Anyone know what happened to them?
I may be wrong but I thought Val Doonican favoured pullovers, not cardigans, borrowed or bought from Perry Como.
Anyhow, in my middle age, Kevin Maher’s teenage years, Maher had a cardigan sporting badges and slogans. He was a particular admirer of a miserable Manchester group called THE SMITHS and its misanthropic front moaner “MORRISSEY” and had a button on his cardigan with the group’s phoney assertion – “MEAT IS MURDER” . You couldn’t trump that for bullshit but you might match it with “YOU CAN’T BEAT BRITISH MEAT”.
What Jonathan Swift would have thought of “MORRISSEY” and Kevin Maher may be inferred from a reading of “A MODEST PROPOSAL”
I doubt very much that Swift would have thought abortion as a subject for a romance or a comedy.
I mentioned Spike Milligan yesterday. He described the Lancashire George Formby’s comic capers as about as funny as an infant being crushed by something or other. And Milligan wrote a poem about abortion which was not comic and seems to have escaped inclusion in popular and academic anthologies.
There is a lot in the public domain which is pro-abortion.
In the interests of fair play, which one might describe as “Cricket” or as our ancestors did, as COTHROM NA FEINNE – I will give it here-
Unto Us
by Spike Milligan
Somewhere at some time
They committed themselves to me
And so, I was!
Small, but I was!
Tiny, in shape
Lusting to live
I hung in my pulsing cave.
Soon they know of me
My mother – my father
I had no say in my being
I lived on trust and love
Though I couldn’t think
Each part of me was saying
A silent “Wait for me
I will bring you love!”
I was taken, blind, naked and defenceless
By the hand of one
Whose good name
Was graven on a plate
In Wimpole Street
and dropped on the sterile floor
of a foot-operated plastic waste bucket.
There was no Queen’s Counsel
to take my brief,
The cot I might have warmed
Stood in Harrod’s shop window,
When my passing was told
My father smiled.
No grief filled my empty space,
My death was celebrated,
With tickets to see Danny La Rue
Who was pretending to be a woman
Like my mother was.
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