A Goodnight to Lullabies

This post may be more for myself than for anything else.  Still, you’re welcome to read it if you want to.

A couple of months back, my youngest son climbed into bed and announced that he would quite like to read this new book he got until he was ready to fall asleep.  This seemed like a very good idea and so we ran with it.

And so ended my fourteen-year-long career of singing to my children.

In fairness, it went on much longer than I thought it could.  With the youngest, it was going on so long that you’d have to wonder where and how it would end.  As with all these lovely childhood things, it finally just fizzled and died in a sweet moment and that was fine,.  It was how it should be.

But, while my memory still holds a little of this, I thought I better set down something about it, for myself, before it slips away.

When my elder son stopped requiring his bedtime song, after his bedtime story, I let it go without a mention but now I can’t, for the life of me, remember what it was I sang for all those years.  It is gone from me, which is kind of sad.

So here, for my own benefit, is a record of the two songs I sang each night for Sam for over eight years.  You’d think I would never forget them but, if I don't write them down, I will.  I’ve done it before.

So, after a chapter or two of the current book (God, how many books have I read aloud?) there would be ‘turning ‘round’ and ‘cosying up’ and then we would have two of the oddest, most inexplicable lullaby choices in the history of tucking-in.

First up, a song hijacked from a ‘Barney’ video tape:  “If All The Raindrops Were Lemon Drops and Gum Drops’.  God knows why.  None of us ever liked Barney all that much and we only had this one video.  I think that early on a large variety of songs were tried out and that one seemed to stick.  I hasten to add it was a reflective slow version of the song, of my own devising, rather than the sickly-sweet panderings of Barney’s eclectic crew.

Then, bringing at least a tad more ‘Street Cred’, came a little Bob Dylan… or not, as the case may be.  You see it was that first song off Dylan’s album ‘Self Portrait’ where he didn’t really sing on it at all.  You know the one?  ‘All the Tired Horses in the Sun, How’m I s’posed to get any Riding Done?   Hmmmm Hmmmm mm hmm hmmmmmm…”

Two choruses of that and that’s it.  A little spiel about doors being left open and teddy being in place - never changing, a set routine for all those years – and off to sleep with satisfying ease.  I often wished I could do it on myself.

So an era passes… and, as I think about it, it wasn’t just bedtime that brought opportunities for songs and fun.  Guys who aren’t dad’s won’t believe this but one of the great opportunities for a bit of banter was at changing time.  Think about it – once the ‘offending material’ was bagged and tagged and everybody cleaned up, you had a wide awake little feller just itching for a bit of fun.  I can’t remember what songs came out in those sessions but the bits I remember, I remember them fondly.

The song that sticks in my head from the baby-fun era is actually the ‘Baby Rice’ song.  When the guys were moving from milk onto solid foods, they were both subjected to the ‘Baby Rice’ song on a regular basis.  It may have scarred them for life.

Sung to the tune of ‘Baby Love’, lyrics by yours truly, it went something like… this:

Baby Rice, Oh Baby Rice
I eat you, oh how I eat you.
When I eat you like I do.
Then I go and do a poo.
Then I feel as good as new.
Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby...

(and around again until all the food was gone)


Yes, yes, I know…

… but they were simpler times.

Achy Dancing Feet

We glided round the floor
Until the stair clock signaled two
When the band packed up and left
Stayed a little longer too

The moon had made our rendezvous
We were pre-arranged to meet
I’ll recall you by your blue eyes
And my achy dancing feet

The party was forgotten
Friends all faded into blue
There was only swirling music
And amazing smiling you

And now the dawn has broken
And I’m standing in the street
With my heart strings all a-tremble
And my achy dancing feet



((from a tweet by @MissPinks))

Memories of Innisfree

Pretty soon now, Leonard Cohen will arrive in my home county of Sligo to play two concerts in the grounds of Lissadell House.

This is the same Lissadell House where Sligo’s beloved poet W B Yeats spent so much time and became so enchanted with the area.  So enchanted that he effectively wrote his own epitaph, in a poem which set out where his final resting place should be and exactly what words should be cut into his headstone:

“Under bare Ben Bulben's head

In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

An ancestor was rector there

Long years ago, a church stands near,

By the road an ancient cross.

No marble, no conventional phrase;

On limestone quarried near the spot

By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by”

And these last three enigmatic lines are indeed cut into limestone ‘quarried near the spot’.  The poem is like a treasure map and Yeats' grave is there to be found at the end of it, exactly as one would expect.

So it seems likely to me that the great poetic soul of Leonard Cohen will be drawn the few miles up the road from Lissadell House to visit this much-visited place.

I bet he will.

But what I also wonder is whether he will be tempted to seek out the island on Lough Gill made famous by a much earlier Yeats Poem.  Will he, too, “Arise and go now, go to Innisfree”?

If you are, indeed, thinking that way, Leonard my lad, (yes, I know you read this) well, let me give you the inside scoop on Innisfree.

Because I know Lough Gill.  I grew up beside the Garavogue river and I fished on the lake for salmon with my brothers on freezing New Years Days where you wouldn’t send a dog outside.  I’ve sat in placid bays of an spring evening among the dark spent mayflies and watched the trout suck them down, without hardly causing a ripple on the water.

I was never the fisherman my brothers or, of course, my Dad was but I knew a little about the lake all the same.

So let me tell you about Innisfree.

There are boats and buses that will take you to Innisfree and they are completely honest and well-meaning, for the island they will show you is indeed called Innisfree.  And you will probably be bewildered and a little disappointed because all you will see is a tiny tree-laden island not far off the shore with no room for docks or moorings let alone beehives or wattle huts.

For this is Innisfree… but it is not Yeats’ Innisfree.

Yeats’ Innisfree is out on the lake and is harder to get to and it is bigger and more sprawling and more baffling.  It is called Church Island.  This is Yeats’ Innisfree.

Back in those days when we went fishing, we would often pull into a sheltered bay on Church Island for the ‘Tea’.  We would light a small fire with twigs and would boil a black crusty kettle with no lid.  We would have white bread sandwiches and, more often than not, watch the rain plant circles out on the lake.  And the smells that haunt us from those times are not of the island or the lake but rather they are of the things we brought  there ourselves and the things we did there ourselves. The wet wood we caused to smoke in the fire, the petrol that dripped from the Seagull ‘Forty Plus’ outboard motors that stained the water with wide flat rainbows.

And what of Yeats?  Well he had been here long before us.  Yes here, not on some tiny tree-ridden rock a stone’s throw from the shore. Here, lost on this island.  He took the name from the other little island and put it here for his literary purposes.  Why would he not?  He was a Poet, it was what he did.

You can look this up on the internet, you can check it out.  But, unless you look quite hard, you won’t find anything of what I am telling you here.  Perhaps I am just making it up, I can’t say who told it to me because I don’t really know. 

But the final proof is out there, on Church Island, because Peace is indeed there, still, and it still comes dropping slow. It really does.

You may think this is all rubbish, that’s okay.  I know in my heart that I’m right.

And if you go there, Leonard – or any of you – then you will know it too.