Letters from Quotidia 2024 Episode 16 New Years Eve

Welcome to Letters from Quotidia 2024, Episode 16. This is the farewell post for 2024, and the farewell post for the Letters, posted on New Year’s Eve. As always, Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

Like the boy who cried “Wolf!” I have called it quits before, only to return with yet more dispatches from the front. And like the boy in Aesop’s fable, one of these days the wolf will really appear, devour the sheep- and the lying shepherd, too- if one credits the more extreme denouement of the tale. But until that time, let us sing and recite poetry, reminisce and raise a toast to love and light and life.

My first song, is Strange Meeting, inspired by the Wilfred Own poem which details the meeting in Hades of two opposing soldiers. The masterful handling of pararhyme creates a haunting, otherworldly soundscape as we follow one of the protagonists deep into the underworld and feel his dislocation as he comes upon one who leaps up, the man he killed, who, With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,/Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless./And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,/ By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell. “Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” /“None,” said that other, “save the undone years,/The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,/Was my life also; I went hunting wild/After the wildest beauty in the world,/Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,/But mocks the steady running of the hour… In the song, I imagine meeting a future version of myself in a pub, where the steady running of the hour turns into days, weeks, years and decades. [insert song]

It is fashionable now to seek out the authentic, to live your best life, and to strive for personal fulfilment. Ah well, I suppose we are all searching for meaning in this bewildering maelstrom that is our existence. My next song explores some of this in a reflective lyric. I’ll preface it with the final stanza from the poem Islands by African American Yusef Komunyakaa dedicated to St Lucia-born poet Derek Walcott.

Islands are tricky entities no matter their size and I’ve spent years exploring the concept by writing about Aruba, Ireland and Australia. To lie down in remembrance/ is to know each of us is a prodigal/ son or daughter, looking out beyond land/ & sky, the chemical & metaphysical/ beyond falling & turning waterwheels/ in the colossal brain of damnable gods,/ a Eureka held up to the sun’s blinding eye,/ born to gaze into fire. After conquering/ frontiers, the mind comes back to rest,/ stretching out over the white sand. [insert song]

Song three is about a particular place that has had rather a bad press over the years-Belfast. In my teens I began to spend weekends in Belfast during the mid-sixties because I had met the girl of my dreams when she was visiting the Glens of Antrim village of Cushendall one summer.

My brother and his family lived in Belfast, and I relished experiencing  the vibrant music scene of the city during weekend sojourns. I followed up by applying to a college there when I was in sixth form and continued to revel in the freedom that those who have just left home for the new phase of their lives can appreciate. But this was before the troubles put paid to all that joy and freedom in 1969.

My father’s family were from Belfast, which was one of the major industrial cities of the Industrial Revolution. The Reverend W. M. O’Hanlon in a work entitled Walks Among the Poor of Belfast painted a vivid picture of the slums there in 1852, the worst of which were as bad as any in any place or age. He wrote…in truth, no pure breath of heaven ever enters here; it is tainted and loaded by the most noisome reeking feculence.

Surely, we’ve reached the bottom of the pit? But no, there is yet a lower circle in this suburb of hell, for the Reverend O’Hanlon continues, still more narrow and wretched containing, I think, nine houses, seven of which, are the abodes of guilt…here every kind of profligacy and crime is carried on…passers of base coin, thieves and prostitutes all herd together…and sounds of blasphemy, shouts of mad debauch, and cries of quarrel and blood are frequently heard here through the livelong night to the annoyance and terror of the neighbourhood…it is the practice of these miscreants to frequent the docks, and, having caught sailors, like unwary birds, in their toils, to allure them into their pitfalls, where they are soon peeled and plundered. But this was the city which I came to love a little over one hundred years later. The song, Belfast Calling, supplies the reasons for this affection. [insert song]

I was a bit like the Lydian king, Croesus, until I was well into my thirties. Not that I was wealthy or powerful, very far from it, then or now, but I was happy, moderately successful in my career, and considered myself bullet-proof. The Athenian lawmaker, Solon, who was visiting Lydia, warned King Croesus, who considered himself the happiest man alive, not to consider himself happy until the end of his life because fortune is fickle, and circumstances can change in an instant. It was not until Croesus had lost his kingdom to Cyrus, the Persian king, and was awaiting execution, that he realised the wisdom of Solon’s advice.

Thirty-five years ago, my first-born son, Brian, was killed in a motorbike accident two months before his sixteenth birthday, and it altered the trajectory of my life and the lives of my family, too. My song, Come Back an Angel, is one of several I have written over the years in response. [insert song]

The penultimate song differs in a couple of ways from the others presented in this post: first, it is recorded live- just one mic on a laptop placed on a table with the group Banter arranged around it; and second, it is the only song where I have not written the music and words. Fifty years ago, I remember struggling to get a chord arrangement going that I was happy with because I was debuting the song with the group I had helped form in Wollongong, NSW- Seannachie.

Fast forward twenty years and I twinned the stirring march tune, The Battle of Aughrim with it for performance with the group Banter in western Sydney. The song in question is a traditional folk song, originally a Scottish border ballad, and popular throughout the English-speaking world. It concerns an elopement where a lady of high distinction runs off with a band of gypsies. So, here now is The Raggle-Taggle Gypsy/The Battle of Aughrim. [insert song]

The final song in this NYE selection is also somewhat different insofar as this song has a jazzy tinge. I wrote it as I was approaching retirement and feeling increasingly out of place- a bit of a fossil, to be frank. I had attended a concert at The Henry Lawson Club in western Sydney in 1996 where a group of English comedians were featured and when I was writing the song a few years later, I remembered the smoke-filled room, risqué jokes that would have the easily offended easily offended and I knew that this was the ending of an era: that the smoke haze from cigars and cigarettes, the frankly sexist jokes and rough camaraderie of working people enjoying themselves would be increasingly challenged by a different dispensation in the 21^st C. So here is Foss Hill (The Old Comedian) [insert song]

I wrote this verse long, long ago- Explication: Like a poem carved upon an ancient bone/Dug out of an ash-pit;/Like an outline of a heart in bog-oak/Dragged up and in to the open air;/Like the remnants of an ancient tune/Whistling through the shaking leaves/Of the last stand of native trees/Left on a fissured plain:/Let my voice, telling of love/And letdowns, carry across/ The fields of time spread/To the shimmering edges/Of eternity fringed with/A sparkling circlet of stars/Before they wink out/One by one,/Swallowed by the incurious/Blankness beyond.”

For NYE 2024, though, I’ll have to leave you with something more hopeful- this from Psalm 18, may serve: You Lord, keep my lamp burning; my God turns my darkness into light. Thank you for your company in these Letters, even if it was for only part of the way. My sign off is not the usual sting but the short Coda, the nearest to a psalm or a hymn I can do- and I wrote it 40 years ago HNY [insert song]

Strange Meeting (music and lyrics by Quentin Bega)

I walked into a strange lounge bar and order a whiskey sour

Found a booth to read a brand-new paper book to pass an hour

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter Thompson’s opus read

A grey-haired guy sat down beside me and without an invite said

That he could explicate Like a Rolling Stone

But he goes to bed most nights of late- alone

We sparred as strangers often do searching for the common ground

He read the title of my book and felt his opening gambit sound

He looked as though an offered drink would not be rejected out of hand

He asked for and got a double gin and told me of his favourite bands

Oh he could explicate Like a Rolling Stone

But he goes to bed most nights of late-alone

Amused I listened to him ramble ordered up another drink

Although he sang the blues his politics, well they’d be a shade of pink

He said he’d seen most continents I said you must’ve got around

I lost count of the gins and whiskeys that afternoon that we poured down

He could explicate Like a Rolling Stone

But he goes to bed most nights of late-alone

He told me life was just a gas but sad eyes told another tale

We both half-smile at the white lie agreeing to meet without fail

I arose to go saw his reflection staring from the mirror-clock

It’s almost forty years since in that mirror our eyes met and locked

Now I can explicate Like a Rolling Stone

But I go to bed most nights of late-alone

I can explicate Like a Rolling Stone

But I go to bed most nights of late-alone

Sing Along  (Words and music Quentin Bega) 

 If you want to go across the sea to Ireland 

If you want to kiss the Blarney Stone In May 

If you want to plant a shamrock in your garland 

If you want to find the fairy folk today 

Come away dream away 

Irish dancing at the Feis is in my mind now 

As your father played his fiddle in the glen 

And you danced upon the platform light and easy 

And the evening sky was glowing after ten 

Once again once again 

But those summer nights are lost to view forever 

Now project houses fill the fields of yore 

And the young folk surf the Web and they have never 

Seen the light shine as it did before 

Nevermore nevermore 

I went searching in the Irish pubs of Sydney 

For an echo of the place where I was born

But it wasn’t there I found it in my backyard 

Among those friends who’ll join me in a song 

Sing along sing along 

          (Repeat verse One) 

Belfast Calling (words and music Quentin Bega)

Belfast Calling me after all these years

I’m not surprised because my life was shaped by Belfast town

No titles bring I’m not bred from kings

But chimneysweeps and sailors neat who lived in Belfast town

Those days are gone forever there is nowhere better

Than the place I know when in dreams I go to Belfast town

I met the sweetest girl she turned my world

Inside out and upside down in Belfast town

By Belfast Lough the city docks to her I came

She took my name in Belfast town

Those days are gone forever there is nowhere better

Than the place I know when in dreams I go to Belfast town

Our daughter born the city torn

By civil strife we had no life in Belfast town

Out here in New South Wales the scattered Gaels

Remember home we’re not alone though far from Belfast town

Those days are gone forever there is nowhere better

Than the place I know when in dreams I go to Belfast town

Belfast Calling me after all these years

I’m not surprised because my life was shaped by Belfast town

I’m not surprised because my life was shaped by Belfast town

Come Back an Angel (words and music by Quentin Bega)

You’ve been gone ages the years have rolled by

Mountains stand the sea is not dry still I cry

My friends and family this daily round helped me find something

But you were not found

Come back an angel could you please

Come back an angel if only in my dreams

You’ve been gone so long

Come back an angel to me

Well I tried religion got down on my knees

The saints and the Virgin I appealed to these I appealed to these

Now if I could carve your name in the sun blazing brightly

This done what would I have won

So come back an angel could you please

Come back an angel if only in my dreams

You’ve been gone so long

Come back an angel to me

Come back an angel could you please

Come back an angel if only in my dreams

You’ve been gone so long

Come back an angel come back an angel come back an angel

The Raggle Taggle Gypsy/ Battle of Aughrim (trad)

There were three yellow gipsies came to our hall door,
And downstairs ran this lady, O!
One sang high and another sang low
And the other sang bonny, bonny Biscay, O!

Then she pull’d off her silk finish’d gown
And put on hose of leather, O!
The ragged, ragged rags all about our door
She’s away with the raggle taggle gipsies, O!

It was late that night, when my lord came home,
Enquiring for his a-lady, O!
The servants said, on ev’ry hand:
She’s away with the raggle taggle gipsies, O!

O, saddle to me my milk-white steed,
And go fetch me my pony, O!
That I may ride to seek my bride,
Who is gone with the raggle taggle gipsies, O!

O he rode high and he rode low,
He rode through woods and copses too,
Until he came to a wide open field,
And there he espied his a-lady, O!

What made you leave your house and land?
What made you leave your money, O?
What made you leave your newly wedded lord,
For to go with the raggle taggle gipsies, O?

What care I for my house and my land?
What care I for money, O?
What care I for my newly wedded lord?
I’m off with the raggle taggle gipsies, O!

Last night you slept on a goose-feather bed,
With the sheet turned down so bravely, O!
And tonight you’ll sleep in a cold open field,
Along with the raggle taggle gipsies, O!

What care I for a goose-feather bed,
With the sheet turned down so bravely, O?
I’d rather have a kiss from the yellow gypsy’s lips,
Than all your houses or your land or your money-O!

The Battle of Aughrim:  a)        Dm C Dm C Am Dm-2

                                                 b) Dm C Am Dm C Am Dm- 2   Repeat a) and b)

Foss Hill (The Old Comedian) words and lyrics by Quentin Bega

I’m leaving no sense in grieving but lately I feel out of place

I’ve noticed when I tell a joke that audiences sit stony-faced

They used to laugh about my bare-foot pregnant dishwashing wife

Now you can cut their silence with a knife

When I started I was light-hearted as I took my show on the road

Did stand-up from Darwin to Hobart searching for the mother lode

But I could never find it low bars cruise ships private functions

I have told jokes in the strangest places

I did TV had my own series if one-year amounts to that name

Then the axe fell it was all over a comic has no one to blame

I watched as younger faces mugged it up as tabloids raged

That my routine was sexist and depraved

(instrumental break)

I’m leaving no sense in grieving but lately I feel out of place

I’ve noticed when I tell a joke that audiences sit stony-faced

They used to laugh about my bare-foot pregnant dishwashing wife

Now you can cut their silence with a knife

So you better believe I’m leaving

Coda (words and music by Quentin Bega)

Something came into my cell today

Feels like the wind

The wind that blows through solid walls

And confining doors

Something touched my wound and made it well

Feels like the hand

The hand that leads the dispossessed

To the promised land

And I don’t want to feel the pain

To grieve in the dark again

If you go away please

Take me with you

(instrumental verse)

And I don’t want to feel the pain

To wake to the dark again

If you go away please

Take me with you

Credits: All written text, song lyrics and music (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone-songs Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.