Jingle hell of festive ditties

They say it’s getting easier to find a job these days, what with unemployment supposedly at its lowest level for years and more and more people allegedly engaged in what passes in this era for gainful employment. Though the authorities’ definition of “gainful” and the one familiar to you and me might be just a little bit different, I suspect. Those ends won’t meet themselves, you know, Chancellor Hammond.

Be that as it may, my strange and peculiar outlook on our place in the universe does, I admit, tend to lead me via odd trains of thought along some weird and wonderful pathways, especially when considering the state of life, the universe and everything, as that inspired tome, The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so succinctly put it.

Having spent much of the past four weeks driving up and down to Edinburgh (and back) practically every day, I have become a one-woman captive audience for whatever’s been on the radio.

While much of this process of travel has involved whiling away time spent in traffic jams by beating my head off the steering wheel at slow-changing traffic lights and fulminating behind people who drive at 50mph in 70 zones then sail through 40 zones at the same stately 50, I have also found my ears assaulted on a hauntingly regular basis by every aspect of Brexit known to humanity (two words you rarely expect to find in the same sentence), and every Christmas carol ever written. Again. And again. And again.

Now I will admit that I have been keeping half a weather-ear open for the version of O, Holy Night sung by a large French choir and tenor Roberto Alagna. Needless to say, it has not come up so far and believe me, if it had, we would all know about it.

M. Alagna’s exuberant approach is absolutely bung full of what classical music’s Italian terms list refers to as “attacca”. I don’t think I need to translate that.

Suffice to say you wouldn’t have to listen very hard to hear it if you were in Forfar and he was gracing the stage of the Caird Hall.

But the repetition of other ditties has become something of a pest. And not only ditties. Adverts. And adverts containing unfortunately deeply memorable, not to say unforgettable, ditties. I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the Senokot song, which sounds like something that might have been dreamed up by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill during the downtime of creating The Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife it ain’t, however.

No doubt it is meant to be, if you will pardon the phrase used in such a context, tongue in cheek. But (and here is where I get round to the opening notion of this column – gainful employment), it depresses me utterly to think of the cheery performers of this song, warbling away enthusiastically about “glee”, “regularity” and the properties of “natural vegetable laxative”. Four years at RADA or the Royal College of Music and you end up with this gig? Someone, somewhere, is surely taking the wotsit.

Then again, some of the “serious” music offered for listening delectation also failed signally to hit the mark. You only have to say the words Ludovico Einaudi in our house to provoke a harmonic chorus of grinding teeth. And last week in the car, the honours of annoyance went to the probably highly authentic, harpsichord version of large parts of the oeuvre of the notably prolific J S Bach.

The Emperor Joseph II of Austria, a man with whom I find myself increasingly in sympathy, once critiqued a work by Wolfgang Amadeus, no less, with the dismissive but (I have no doubt) completely correct appraisal: “Too many notes, Mr Mozart.”

Herr Bach’s Italian Concerto, presented on the above-mentioned clattering instrument, elicited a similarly pithy response from the Significant Other, who was woken up by it as we traversed a diversion that took us miles out of our way in the middle of a night of truly horrible weather. Did this affect his mood or his appreciation of the music? I cannot say. All I know is what he said, unprompted.

“Sounds like a plumber’s tool bag in a washing machine,” he muttered. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Here’s wishing you a joyful 2019 And on that cheery note, literally, ‘tis time to wish you all out there in Courier Country the happiest of times to come in 2019. No matter what happens round about us all in this whirling maelstrom of incomprehensible activity, let’s try to find a bit of joy and contentment where and when we can.

Happy New Year!

I have become a one-woman captive audience for whoever’s on radio

Wherever you are right now, you can probably hear the exuberant singing of Roberto Alagna.