Day 597: I Correspond With A Colleague In New York

It is snowing hard in Quebec, and I am recovering from an illness which mainly involved (and still does) feeling drunk and coughing up hard yellow clumps. I have been travelling about the place: to New York, to Toronto, to Montreal and back again; my brother, RunningMonkey, is visiting; the pathologist is snowblowing; all is right in the world.

And emails are sent as I work from home, developing 'advertising strategies' for providers of products that all Canadians definitely need. I write to H, who is in our New York office. "What are you doing?", says the subject line of my email. "Whatever it is, stop it now", says the body.

He replies the next day. "Watching Weng Weng!". He provides a link. Here it is:




I love you, my Weng Weng.

If you do not like Weng Weng, you may wish to learn the Theremin.



With enough application, you may become as accomplished as this lady!



Bonne chance, mes amis.

Day 587: I Am Very Much Looking Forward To Going Home

Home, sweet home: dear house stranded at the end of an ice-encrusted road at the raw edges of a village inhabited by crazed French-Canadians; sweet abode positioned on a sharp bend at the end of a short drive obscured by two 12 foot mountains of snow; gentle three-bedroomed metal structure with frozen swimming pool: O how I yearn for thee! But not for the reasons you might think (own bed, lightly-furred pathologist, gin, green vegetables); good Heavens, no.

I yearn to be home because I want to get my tiny little monkey hands on my books. And why should I need these books? Why, it is simple! Dear Anna has "tabbed me on a Meem" (as I believe the young people say!!!), and it is really good - but it requires me to turn to p. 123 of the book(s) I am reading and copy out some sentences. Sadly, I am here in Toronto and they are there in the wilds of Quebec (just north of Montreal), so it will have to wait until I am home on Friday, small clay pipe clamped between my teeth and tiny glass of absinthe at my elbow.

But let it not be said that I do not know all the 'marketing ploys', for now I am about to whet your appetite and get you 'literally gagging for it'. The good news is that I always read up to and including ten books at the same time, which means my post (when I write it) will be really long and interesting. The bad news is that at least one of them is about Canadian foreign policy.

To my surprise, I have discovered that not only does Canada have a foreign policy, but that that foreign policy does not contain any strategies involving members of the RCMP* seeing off the enemy atop a flock of armoured beavers. What is more, the book in question (which you may see above) carries the subtitle "What Is Canada For?". I am on page 823, but still there is no clear conclusion other than "Canada exists to be less annoying than America".

In the meantime, my recent post about songs of my childhood has attracted more comments than any other post, ever, but as my loyal readers and new fans continue to comment in a crazed style, I have put a link to it just there on the right so that it may continue indefinitely, or at least until we have a compendium of childhood songs that we may publish for charity.

Pip pip!

NWM


PS. No, but seriously - what is Canada for?


* Or, to give them their full name, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ("Mounties" to anyone who has ever seen a picture-book about Canada, or that weird programme that featured a single lone Mountie (on a horse) somewhere in an urban environment in the US, occasionally accompanied by the bloke called Leslie.)

Day 587: I Am Tired, Busy And Travelling About The Place

But this does not mean that I have forgotten you, dear readers; for here is a picture (old, seen before) of a man in a cap, holding a gigantic cat.

Day 585: I Receive Guidance Unbidden On The Streets Of New York

Day 577: I Remember The Songs Of My Childhood

I am in the kitchen squirting lemon juice onto a chicken whilst chanting in a low style:

"Easy peasey Japanesey
Wash your face with lemon squeezy."

I look up. The pathologist with whom I live looks as if he would like to perform an autopsy on my brain to see if it is made of feathers.

It is the morning! We are chewing at our breakfast like beavers at fresh logs. "I like your plum jam", yelps the pathologist, through a mouthful of cheese and marmalade*. I start to sing:

"There's a place in France
Where the naked ladies dance
There's a hole in the wall
Where the men can see them all."

"It is a song of my childhood!", I mutter, picking cranberries out of my teeth. "Very good", says the pathologist.

I am not interested in the various versions of "Happy Birthday To You" (e.g., "You live in a zoo/You smell like a monkey/And you look like one too"; or "Squashed bananas and stew/Bread and butter in the gutter", or indeed "You smell like a poo", my personal favourite), but I would very much like to know where the ghastly 'Easy peasy Japanesey' came from (true facts only please, not speculation), and if you have any childhood songs of your own that you would like to share with the group.

Finally, I offer you a poem that you probably will not know, for it was (or so he claimed) made up by my grandfather:

"The elephant is a pretty bird
It hops from twig to twig
It lays its nest in a rhubarb tree
And whistles like a pig."

**UPDATE**

MonkeyMother reminds me (via the medium of the comment box) of the strange song my Yorkshire grandfather (not the one with the elephant bird) used to sing:

"Who's that knocking at the window?
Who's that knocking at the door?
If it's Johnson with his pies
Then we'll give him two black eyes
And he won't come knocking anymore."

This, in turn, reminds me of two other rhymes my mother (and her mother) would recite (this is how I remember them; I've looked for them on the Google and they are always different - the Willy one is attributed/misattributed/not attributed to Ogden Nash, but as far as I'm concerned my Granny had them in her head, and that will do for me):

"Willy, in the best of sashes
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes
Now, although the room grows chilly
No-one likes to poke poor Willy."

This would often be swiftly followed by:

"'Quick, quick, the cat's been sick!'
'Where, where?' 'Over there!'
'Hasten, hasten, fetch a basin!'
'Too late, the carpet's in a terrible state'."

And both might preceed the recital of A.A.Milne's The King's Breakfast, recited (from memory) whilst we were in the bath. (I strongly recommend reading The King's Breakfast out loud in sonorous tones if you are a bit drunk. It is very entertaining, and I have never known why.)

And finally: does anyone know where "Pass the sickbag, Alice", comes from? We say it about things that are very cheesy or nauseatingly cloy/sucky uppy, e.g. small children singing like grownups, people sucking up, TV tributes to the genius of someone a bit rubbish, etc.

* Interestingly, he is not able to only have one thing on his toast. He must combine, e.g. cheese + honey, or peanut butter + jam, or cheese + marmalade, etc.