Christmas Donkeys
I’ve always liked donkeys. It probably began when my favourite aunt paid for me to ride on one on Ramsgate Sands back in the 1930s. So, when I was writing new Christmas carols a few years ago, donkeys presented themselves before me and insisted that I should write something about them. 'After all', they said, 'we're part of the Christmas story'.
I fell to imagining three of them in their retirement, standing happily together in a field somewhere, chatting about their memories. The oldest one said he remembered carrying a young woman up to Bethlehem. She was about to have a baby.
The second one nodded slowly. He said yes, he remembered carrying that baby when he’d grown to a 12-year-old boy. His name was Jesus. And the third, the youngest, said he could remember carrying that same boy Jesus after he’d grown to a man. Lots of crowds in Jerusalem, he said, all cheering him.
I wrote the carol especially for children’s choirs, with composer John Barnard setting the words to music. Listen to it now, while you read. NOTE: The version below is the present one; the singers had a slightly earlier version - but the meaning is the same.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
No Small Wonder
One November morning in 1983 a young composer gathered up his week’s bundle of laundry and was about to leave for the local launderette when he remembered the envelope. It had come in the post that morning. He quickly opened it and scanned the letter. It was from me.
The letter ended with a new work - a Christmas carol, just three short verses. The great composer of choral works, Paul Edwards, had already set a number of my lyrics for choir and this was a new one. He slipped it into his pocket. Something to read while he waited for the machine to do the washing, he thought. Then, as an afterthought, he picked up a sheet of music manuscript as well. He just might get an idea while he waited for his laundry.
In the launderette he loaded the machine and sat down. He took out the envelope and read the poem. He grabbed the scrap of manuscript paper and began writing.
Listen now to what Paul Edwards wrote:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Trying to imagine how any composer could write this profound music while surrounded by the noise of washing machines is practically impossible.
The words had a similarly unlikely beginning. Earlier that same November I must have heard someone say something like, ‘Small wonder you didn’t see it - they cancelled the programme!’ Just those two words, small wonder, stuck in my head for the rest of the day and they were the first thing I thought of when I woke the next morning. All through that day they were going round and round. I tried writing it down to see if that would stop it - and then I had a bright idea. I was in the middle of writing lyrics for a new collection of Christmas carols and I wondered if I might write a carol based on the words. And so the carol emerged.
The sheet music is published by (click on Animus ) and it is available in collections published by the (Click on) Jubilate Group.
COMING VERY SOON - Christmas Donkeys
Been robbed this year?
As I sat at this desk this morning reading about the likely demise of real books (the ink-on-paper sort) I looked up at the books in front of me. One of them has been in my posession for over sixty years. I was in the RAF. One night, I was feeling low. I picked it up and liked what I read. Nobody wanted it so I kept it. I loved that book and still do.
I have just counted; there are twenty books like that on these shelves. A memory is attached to each one.
Today’s 10-year-old who has an ebook and in 2050 is still depending on its equivalent will know nothing of the affection a slightly grubby book can generate. Fifty years on, the hole in the heart will be bigger on those low days. You need little memories when you’re old.
Helping to ensure that the ebook will flourish are the crooks who work at creating software capable of copying text from the ebook. Having created it they’ll copy like mad and produce as many thousand copies as they wish and put them on the market. Publishers will suffer. Authors will suffer.
And scanners. I once knew a man and wife who ran a choir. A choir has to buy printed music and words, 30 or so copies of each new piece and, after the concert, file them away in boxes and gradually build a whole library of them. I once asked this couple if they didn’t find the cost of music pretty heavy.
The man smiled and held a finger to his lips. ‘Oh, no,’ he whispered, ‘I just go to the lending library in town, get one copy and shove it on my scanner. Bang off thirty or so. Simple!’
I thought of the quarterly royalties coming in from lyrics I had written and had been published round the world. Coming to me is something like 0.005 pence per copy. And in US Cents? I haven't worked that one out.
Scanners. Ebooks. . .
Figure.
Stanley J Sharpless again
So many of you have been looking at my other page about Stanley Sharpless that I'm prompted to tell you about something I discovered. If you're a Sharpless fan you'll certainly have heard it before.
I had no thought of ever hearing his voice again but I heard it only minutes ago - the voice of a very much older man than when I last heard it. In my memory his voice is part of the scenery, the warm and high-spirited atmosphere of the Advertising Department five storeys high above the busy tree-lined Kingsway, near Holborn Station. In the clip he is reading his now famous limerick about cocoa coursing through the veins of the elderly lovers. As I listened I saw his face again, the usual smile, the steel-rimmed spectacles, the delicately hooked nose.
Listen to it now, here.