‘The Gondoliers’
Good morning,
As I promised when beginning this Companionship series, members of the Chaplaincy team will also be contributing. Today we hear from Revd Professor Ian Bradley, Honorary Church of Scotland Chaplain, who writes as follows:
Readers of The Times have already been offered a leading article in the form of a parody of the major-general’s song from The Pirates of Penzance as a way of bringing some joy back into our lives and restore ‘some of the fun we used to have before this bloody virus’.
Among the casualties of the coronavirus close-down are the University Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s production of Patience and Scottish Opera’s The Gondoliers which was due to star St Andrews alumnus Ben McAteer as the Grand Inquisitor.
A Quintet from The Gondoliers comes as near as anything to expressing Gilbert & Sullivan’s shared philosophy of carpe diem, taking life as it comes and not worrying about things.
I offer it as a little nugget of good advice and good cheer in these rather dark days:
Try we life-long, we can never
Straighten out life’s tangled skein,
Why should we, in vain endeavour,
Guess and guess and guess again?
Life’s a pudding full of plums,
Care’s a canker that benumbs.
Life’s a pudding full of plums,
Care’s a canker that benumbs.
Wherefore waste our elocution
On impossible solution?
Life’s a pleasant institution,
Let us take it as it comes,
Let us take it as it comes!
Set aside the dull enigma,
We shall guess it all too soon;
Failure brings no kind of stigma–
Dance we to another tune!
String the lyre and fill the cup,
Lest on sorrow we should sup.
String the lyre, fill the cup,
Lest on sorrow we should sup.
Hop and skip to Fancy’s fiddle,
Hands across and down the middle–
Life’s perhaps the only riddle
That we shrink from giving up!
[And now back to Donald]
My own connection to Gilbert and Sullivan is rather meagre – I think I once went to a student production of Ruddigore in Aberdeen because I knew one of the singers, and that’s about it. But my father used to play an LP by the Scottish tenor Kenneth McKellar when we ate lunch at the weekend, including (though my memory may be playing me false here) his version of “On a tree by a river a little tom-tit” from The Mikado. Last semester I was taking part in the heart’s time, a poetry workshop with our Quaker Chaplain Barbara Davey, in which we all had half an hour or so to write something in response to a poem called “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. Suddenly, the memory of that music came to mind, and especially the refrain of that song by Gilbert and Sullivan – Willow, titwillow, titwillow. And then the poem came…
Those Winter Sundays
At lunch, I’d ask –
over Kenneth McKellar –
if you’d have time for a game in the den.
Willow, titwillow, titwillow.
I’d set it up,
Scrabble, sometimes chess,
and you’d come down with all you’d need,
Whisky Flake and Swan Vestas,
and in the fug we’d play,
the window darkening,
the words spreading,
the knights falling.
I suppose you were proud
when I tripled my words,
when I took your queen,
but it didn’t show.
I miss those games now,
the minutes waiting for a move,
the smoky concentration,
the gift and waste of time
we’ll never get back.
Dance we to another tune – wrote W. S. Gilbert. And the gift and waste of time, written when we little knew this year would have so much time, perhaps for music or for Scrabble or for chess.
Finally, if you would like to see a prayer for these times, we posted one on the Chaplaincy facebook page yesterday: https://www.facebook.com/mansefield/
Yours,
Donald.