Up in the air junior birdman

The title of this post is from a Tom Lehrer pre-amble to his song: 'It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier', just so as you know. The post itself has nothing to do with Tom Lehrer or the military; it was merely suggested by my synapses when I considered the words 'up in the air', which is where things are. Yet again. However, it really is an amusing song (on the album 'An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer', which I have blogged about before, so if you haven't done so, go listen.

But I was up in the air I believe. Yes, that wonderful work calliope has spun around again, and everyone's doing their damnedest to lick Gideon's boots by slashing and burning first and hardest. My little corner of public funding will not escape, and there will be somewhere in the order of a 20% reduction in posts come the new year. Naturally I'm a little nervous, being a new boy, that I will be one of the unfortunate ones and will once more be out amid the cold world's strife, searching for the gainful. But hey-ho. What can you do?  Whoever said that working in the public sector is an easy life clearly didn't try it, because ever since I've been involved, there's been nothing but change and challenge.

Speaking of evenings - or afternoons - wasted, I happened on the Everton game in Doyle's on Saturday, at least for the second half, when Eileen turned up and managed to get the German sports channel on, but realised pretty quickly that I shouldn't have bothered. As the game degenerated into a manic pinball session, I could see that the Toffees were going to do us again. And so it was to be. There's nothing funny about Balotelli when he gives the ball away so easily, and there was nothing funny about losing that match either.

On to the Tottenham boys tomorrow evening, and it could all go horribly wrong.

Complex complex

"I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them." (Tom Lehrer interviewed in 2003)

On a couple of occasions recently, the great (and I use the term advisedly) Tom Lehrer has been on my mind, though I'm sure he will never go that far away from it.

First, I had sung his marvellous Christmas Carol - oddly, and I don't know why - on the occasion of England's ignominous defeat to Croatia. Then I was standing outside Waitrose to catch the bus home, when the song popped into my head again, this time perhaps more logically prompted by the mountains of boxes and tins of Christmas stuff all over the place. The rhyming of Dickens and sickens is enough for me.

Then, just yesterday, after finding the picture of Sophocles to head up the post on Anne Atkins, naturally his brilliant Oedipus Rex began a relentless onslaught on my brain's music retention centre. I don't mind. I play a game to see if I can remember all the lines, and don't usually do too badly:

"So be sweet and kind to mother, now and then have a chat
Buy her candy or some flowers, or a nice new hat.
But maybe you had better let it go at that...
Or you might find yourself with a quite complex complex,
You may end up like old Oedipus -
I'd rather marry a duck-billed platypus -
Than end up like old Oedipus Rex"

In any case, all hail the mighty Tom (who will be 80 next April) Long may he reign.

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