Quentin Bega

Letters From Quotidia Episode 6 A Touch of Ireland

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

There is a small community radio station called WOW FM in St Marys, a suburb of Sydney’s outer west. It caters for a range of ethnic and community groups as well as individuals who have a yen for presenting and who can convince the board that what they have to offer is in harmony with the ethos and aims of the station.

St Marys, situated around South Creek which flows through the Cumberland plain at the foot of the Blue Mountains, was originally settled by the Commerigal-Tongarra tribe of the Dharug people about 45,000 years ago. But those vast swathes of time and all the men, women and children pouring down the generations are largely hidden to view: a not unusual consequence of European settlement and its aftermath.

We know the names of the invading overlords and their lackeys who were granted land by the English crown. The flogging parson, Samuel Marsden, for example, was given over 1000 acres in the area by Governor King who also ensured that his own family got in on the land grab. Lots of details and names here, but I can’t find any of the names of the Aboriginal dispossessed.

I’ll have something to say about the dispossessed in a later entry, but for now, I want to get down from the soap-box I seem to have mounted and talk about the Irish connection. During the 19^th Century as the Sydney basin was increasingly settled, convicts-Irish among them- provided an economic way of ensuring rapid development. And, no doubt confounding the shades of the likes of Samuel Marsden, the convicts, for most part, prospered and put their stamp on the region.

The small settlement on the banks of South Creek continued to grow and, by the second decade of the 20^th Century, a serene and prosperous township was dreaming in the Australian sun, entirely oblivious of the apocalypse hatching in the soul of a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo. Lines of a local poet, George Sullivan recall those idyllic days:

If only Victoria Park could speak/ What wondrous tales from it you’d share, /About those careless, happy days/ When it was called ‘The Square’./ It could tell of all the bullocks/That were roasted on its green;/Of the glorious games of football/By sportsmen strong and clean./ It could tell of games of cricket,/ Of how the wickets soon did fall/When demon bowlers, Royal and Tolhurst,/Did send down the ball. The names of all too many of those sportsmen strong and clean would be inscribed in bronze on tablets marking the fallen in the Great War, and subsequent wars, on the octagonal Rotunda. The phrase, strong and clean emerges 60 years later when Redgum sang, This clipping from the paper shows us young and strong and clean/ And there’s me in me slouch hat and me SLR and greens/ God help me, I was only 19.

The Irish love sport and having a flutter. They also love their culture and, in the mid-nineties, Jim Clarke and Noel O’Donohue started a radio program they called, A Touch of Ireland. For almost two decades they presented music, news and items of interest for their audience, largely, but not entirely, the Irish diaspora. From convict times to the present there have been waves of Irish migrants, among whom I would number myself, who have found in Australia a refuge from political and economic turmoil. I was a regular listener to the program and it struck me as a refreshing change from so much of the garbage spewing from the commercial stations by obscenely overpaid shock jocks. You know who I mean, those contemptible commentators who classify it as a missed opportunity if they can’t turn a radio listener from someone at peace with his or her world into a tightly wound xeno- or islamo- or homo-phobe, frothing at the mouth. I expect there is a special section of hell reserved for them.

I wrote the song, A Touch of Ireland, in gratitude to people like Jim and Noel that the airwaves were not the sole preserve of hate-mongers. This was shortly after the start of the new millennium when planes should have been falling from the sky and energy grids collapsing- all because the computer geeks had not realised that two-digit year dates repeated every century. Weren’t we all so happy that the sky did not fall in courtesy of the millennium bug? Of course, the sky didn’t fall in, but, from the sky, ushering in a change as profound as that caused by that bullet in Sarajevo, two planes struck the twin towers in New York City and- here we are.

But life goes on, and, while Jim and Noel are no longer hosting the program they conceived all those years ago, I am happy to say that I now co-present the show, A Touch of Ireland. I am happy to dedicate the song, also called A Touch of Ireland, to the men who brought a touch of Ireland to the audience of our community radio station: well done, guys! [insert song A Touch of Ireland] Join me next time- as well as a bunch of dogs, cats, pigs and characters from Shakespeare-to say nothing of Ray Charles and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as we examine the pro’s and con’s of owning a pet, among other things…

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

Recording and mixing down 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended

Music accompaniment and composition software– Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.

Letters From Quotidia Episode 5 Changes

Don’t you love creation myths? The question, Where do we come from? is swiftly followed by Where are we going? The latter question may be addressed in a later entry but for now I’ll talk about beginnings. Genesis was the earliest myth I encountered, with its poetry and puzzles. Later, I found other accounts to puzzle and delight me.

The Chinese creation myth is one example. According to my muse, Wikipedia, the creator, a being named Pangu, slept on, or perhaps in, a black egg of chaos and when the principles of Ying and Yang were perfectly poised, the whole shebang kicked off. Somewhere in the mix, a bit later on I guess, were brother and sister, Fu Xi and Nü Wa who were the original humans.

One day, for reasons I couldn’t discover, they set up two separated piles of fire, and the fire eventually became one. Then, under the fire they decided to become husband and wife. Fu Xi subsequently observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams “in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things.”

This becomes the basis of Taoist and Confucian divination that we know as the I Ching, which is a canonical text among New Agers, but has a wider cultural currency. Most people know about the system for divination using the throwing of sticks to form a pattern or generating random numbers in a computer to access the 64 hexagrams- all very abstruse and interesting in its own way, but not really what I want to talk about- I was simply struck by the fact that I Ching translates as Changes– the name of my song- as I was fossicking through the website.

As Chrissie Hynde sings, in her composition, Hymn to Her “some things change, some stay the same” Change and Stasis- opposed yet linked concepts have intrigued people other than Chrissie from the beginning, I would wager. But, for my money, the best explication of this duality is John Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn. On the urn is depicted a scene from a Greek idyll featuring gods, perhaps, lovers and musicians trapped in time forever and the subject of future generations’ perusal and inquiry. The closing lines are among the most famous in all literature: When old age shall this generation waste, /Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/ Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, /”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Well, actually, we do need to know a bit more.

But I applaud the genius that wrote those words and who perished way too early: which reminds me of Stephen Spender’s poem, I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great He was only 21 and thinking about sex and Beethoven and Michelangelo when he wrote this poem containing the lines: What is precious is never to forget/The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs/ breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth…/Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother/with noise and fog the flowering of the spirit. This echoes the great Wordsworth sonnet: The world is too much with us; late and soon/ Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/ Little we see in nature that is ours/ We have given our hearts away: a sordid boon!

God, how I love words such as these, used by those who are truly great. So this brings me back to where this entry started- The Bible: not the Old Testament, but the New, where the Gospel of John begins…here it is in Latin– In principio erat verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum: In the English of the King James Bible it renders as, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. But the Logos-which is Greek for Word– doesn’t originate with John but can be traced back to Heraclitis- you know, the dude who said you couldn’t step in the same stream twice.

Were I asked to give my tuppence worth, which, godlike, and within the confines of this podcast, I can, I’d say something like “the Word, the Logos, is not passive; a mere spoken or written construct containing, signs, signals and information. Rather, it is like an utterance of power from a Bach chorale strung out eternally, sung by a chorus of angels with attendant seraphim ringing all the changes, and surpassing, to the nth degree, the music of the spheres.”

Lord, that exercise in verbosity has given me the head-staggers and while I would wish to be able, like Fu Xi, to study the patterns of the world in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright, I think I’ll have to be content to pick up my guitar, strum a few chords, look at the ceiling and try to draw down inspiration from Calliope, Erato and Euterpe, the three sisters who are daughters of mighty Zeus and the muses of poetry and music. [insert the song Changes] For my next excursion, now- that I sort of know you all, in a virtual sort of a way, let me transport you to the Cumberland plain of western Sydney where I have made my home for the last twenty five years.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

Recording and mixing down 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended

Letters From Quotidia Postcards Edition One

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia, the Postcards edition, number 1, a podcast by Quentin Bega where you will hear Banter, a traditional Irish folk group from Sydney’s outer west, present four tunes and songs drawn from the traditions of the English-speaking world. And, as always, Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

In Banter, I play guitar. The fiddle is played by Mark Monaghan, my nephew. On mandolin is his father, Jim Monaghan, and on bodhran is Sammy Beggs, a friend of long standing. The vocals are shared among Jim, Sammy and me. This is pretty much Banter’s performance set-up for the last quarter century and that arrangement suits us just fine. Don’t move with the times, transcend them. (Or so we tell ourselves!)

Now, a brief word on the recordings: items one and three in each postcard edition were recorded almost 10 years back for a friend who spent a brief time in the band in the 90s. He wanted to take some music back to Ireland where he was making a last visit before his final illness claimed him. I set up a laptop on a table with its in-built mic and we played and had a few drinks and a bit of crack over several nights. These are very much unadorned live takes. Items two and four, however, were recorded in lockdown during 2020 and feature just me, but with a better microphone and music software in the place of live musicians for accompaniment. This is courtesy of COVID-19. I would have preferred our wee group for all the selections, but needs must. Therefore, you will find items 1&3 to be rough and ready, but with an undeniably live vibe, whereas items 2&4, it must be said in their favour, are a bit more polished.

I learned the first tune you’re going to hear back in the mid-1970s. when I played with Seannachie, a pioneering folk group in Wollongong at that time. The Spanish Cloak is an instrumental piece, sometimes known as The Munster Cloak. [insert tune, The Spanish Cloak]

Second, is a Ewan McColl composition about the truckies who plied their trade in Britain during the pre-motorway days of the 1950s. It has a great title, Champion at Keeping Them Rolling. I heard the Dubliners do this from an LP I listened to donkey’s years ago. The tune is that of an old Irish song called The Limerick Rake. Incidentally, I saw Ewan McColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger, perform in the mid-1970s in Wollongong Town Hall. It was a great concert and lives in my memory still. [insert song, Champion at Keeping Them Rolling]

Our third selection, The Diamantina Drover, is marvellous song which looks at the Australian experience. The drover is an iconic Aussie character and here the persona reflects upon the landscape, his regrets and longings, in a uniquely Antipodean way. Written by Hugh McDonald, who performed and recorded with the Bushwackers, the Sundowners, Banshee, Redgum, Des “Animal” McKenna, Moving Cloud and the Colonials, this is one of our favourite songs. I have to report, sadly, that Hugh lost his battle with prostate cancer in November, 2016, a real loss to Australian folk music. This song has by far the most listens of any of the items on my website The Summa Quotidian at quentinbega.com [insert The Diamantina Drover]

The final selection for this postcard, Rosalita and Jack Campbell was written twenty years ago or so by Sean Mone of Keady, Co Armagh about the terror of drive-bys and targeted assassinations in Belfast in the early 1970s. Hearing the song recently, by Christy Moore, brought it all back to me, because, not just ourselves, but just about everybody in Belfast and Northern Ireland who lived through those times has been touched by such a shooting or other instance of violence associated with the “Troubles”. This song, too, attracts quite a few hits on my website. Listen if you can to Sean Mone who does a great a capella version. Anyway, here’s my take. [insert song Rosalita and Jack Campbell.]

That has been the first postcard from Quotidia. And isn’t it peculiarly Irish that the postcards are longer than the Letters From Quotidia. Ah well! Our next edition of postcards will feature Mark on fiddle for a fine rendition of The King and Queen of the Fairies. I’ve long loved and performed Christy Moore’s rousing ballad about the Spanish Civil War, Viva La Quinta Brigada, and this will be our second offering. Songs about the sea are a big feature in our sets and Jim Monaghan excels at singing these. The Mermaid is our third item for postcards. Last, I present Gentle Annie (not the Tommy Makem version, but instead that of Stephen Foster.) Like many another song, it travelled to Australia where it acquired local lyrics by an Australian thresher from over a century ago by the name of Lame Jack Cousens of Springhurst, Victoria. So, join me, then, for another foray into the fabulous arena that is, folk music.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used for recording and mixing down

Music accompaniment and composition software- Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.

I play an Ashton MDE200 Mandolin on “Rosalita and Jack Campbell“

Letters from Quotidia Episode 4 Foss Hill (The Old Comedian)

Letters From Quotidia Episode 4 Foss Hill (The Old Comedian)

Letters From Quotidia Episode 3 Cannery Row

Cannery Row Welcome to Letters From Quotidia – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary. This is the third letter of the series, entitled, Cannery Row, where we journey from library vans to ancient Greek battlegrounds to an 18^th Century Irish poet lamenting over the fate of a dead bird at the side of a lake

I used the phrase” elsewhere in the English-speaking world” in my last podcast. The listener may deduce also, that I was born in Ireland- Northern Ireland to be more precise, and in the small coastal village of Cushendall in County Antrim to be exact. The short novel by John Steinbeck provides the title and is the starting point for the song you’ll hear at the end of the podcast. Juxtaposed with the rich engagement shown by the characters of the Monterrey wharfs is the constrained and feeble existence of the persona of this song who makes T.S. Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock seem a dashing, devil-may-care figure in comparison.

I began writing this song in 1982 after catching a glimpse of myself reflected in the windows of the brand-new library in Cushendall, where the line “.…my cheek on one shoulder I walk past the shelves of the library just before dark…” came unbidden into my mind. Before that, we booklovers had waited patiently for the mobile library van to arrive at the car-park beside the old watering trough. It came from Ballymena, twenty-odd miles up the road and well outside the world of the Glens of Antrim. Then, we eagerly mounted the steps to peruse the few shelves where, perhaps, something of interest or value might hide. You know, I felt a pang of loss when the mobile library van disappeared.

I’m not sure the proliferation of books made possible by the permanent structure, compensated for the shared camaraderie of those diverse yet grimly determined people who gathered for years in stoical anticipation for the arrival of that magical van containing- books- from the outer world. A pang of nostalgia swept over me when I saw the library van scene from the film Billy Elliot and I wonder what the future holds for libraries of the sort I grew up with in our brave new world of instant information.

I feel much more comfortable in antiquity, where information was hard-won and is best embodied by the legend of the Greek messenger, Pheidippides, who ran the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens in 490 BC with the news of the Athenian victory over the Persian forces of Darius. Ten years later his son, Xerxes, attempted to avenge the defeat of Darius. His campaign gave rise to that iconic symbol of heroic resistance against overwhelming odds- the battle of Thermopylae- where, outnumbered 20 to 1, the Spartans held the Persians at bay to the last man, under the leadership of Leonidas, their king. The poet Simonides has left us with a few terse lines of poetry which have been a reminder to generations ever since of the courage of men who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country: Stranger passing by, tell the Lakedaimonians/ Here we lie, having obeyed their orders. And, although the Greek forces lost the battle at Thermopylae, they defeated Xerxes fleet at the battle of Salamis and this ushered in the Classical Age on which so much of western civilisation is based. I’m pretty sure most males, like me, feel a certain loss, not to have experienced war. Is this an atavistic urge, I wonder?

But, back to the song, Cannery Row: it is inspired by the Steinbeck novel of the same name. The Moonglow Quintet, mentioned in the song, is based on a band, which played old standards and certainly nothing written after the year 1959. I heard them plying their trade, only once, in a small time-warped club among the cane fields of North Queensland in 1992 where, improbably, they became the inspiration for the bridge of the song which I had started writing a decade previously. Songwriting 101 tells us that you do not mix up tenses or pronouns but this song does all that- I knew it as I was writing it but I did not amend it as I felt the listener could navigate the switching points of view because we all do it all the time in the space inside the skull where past, present, future, I, you and them are swirling and churning all the time- or is it just me? In a novel, or even a short story, it would be annoying if not confusing.

The miniature form that is the song can, at times, cope with shifting, lurching views. I would like to preface the 6/8 tune you’re about to hear with a few lines from the poet Seamus Heaney in his translation of the poem The Yellow Bittern from the Irish of the 18^th Century poet with the splendidly euphonious name- Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna because I, like Mack and the boys from Cannery Row, find the prospect of life without the consolations of wine and its multifarious related potions unbearable: The poet finds the yellow bird dead at the loughside and thinks about its fate which he ascribes to thirst, not hunger. The woman I love says to give it up now/ Or else I’ll go to an early grave,/ But I say no and keep resisting/ For taking drink’s what prolongs your days./ You saw for yourself a while ago/ What happened to the bird when its throat went dry;/ So my friends and neighbours, let it flow: / You’ll be stood no rounds in eternity. [insert song Cannery Row]

If you get a chance, seek out this fine poem in translation by the great poet Seamus Heaney. That’s been Cannery Row, the third instalment in the podcast series, Letters From Quotidia. Next, we’ll join an old comedian as he fails to negotiate the shifting sands of our censorious new world. Come join us.

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. Mark Dougherty, freelance Musical Director and composer, former student of mine from Ballymena Academy and longtime friend and present day collaborator in various musical enterprises, assisted in the composition of the song, Cannery Row.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used for recording and mixing down

Letters From Quotidia Episode 2 Let Them Not Fade Away

Let Them Not Fade Away [Welcome to Letters from Quotidia – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack- that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary. Today I examine formative influences on so many of my generation of Baby Boomers who blossomed in the ‘60s in this, the second letter, entitled Let Them Not Fade Away.

In the previous entry, I stated that were I an ancient Greek, my name would be Procrastis but I’ve been wondering, in my usual desultory fashion, if I might not, with more accuracy, have taken the ancient Greek name of Procrustes. And here I defer once more to the oracular Wikipedia: In the Greek myth, Procrustes was a son of Poseidon with a stronghold on Mount Korydallos at Erineus, on the sacred way between Athens and Eleusis There he had an iron bed, in which he invited every passer-by to spend the night, and where he set to work on them with his smith’s hammer, to stretch them to fit. In later tellings, if the guest proved too tall, Procrustes would amputate the excess length; nobody ever fit the bed exactly, because secretly Procrustes had two beds. Procrustes continued his reign of terror until he was captured by Theseus, travelling to Athens along the sacred way, who “fitted” Procrustes to his own bed: He killed Damastes, surnamed Procrustes, by compelling him to make his own body fit his bed, as he had been wont to do with those of strangers. And he did this in imitation of Heracles. For that hero punished those who offered him violence in the manner in which they had plotted to serve him.

Are not all artists Procrustes? Here am I, shaping a journalistic narrative around a series of songs by selecting and editing bits and pieces from the world of letters. I suppose this is a cautionary note: don’t get seduced by the notion that any of this represents anything other than itself. On the other hand, unlike the original Procrustes, I hope that any idea for a song that is passing by survives the smith’s hammer of my imagination as I struggle to shape it into something pleasing. I am a baby boomer as I mentioned before, and, as a teenager during the years 1963 through 1969, was staggered at the brilliance and variety of music being produced in this period. The Beatles, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Who, Hendrix and Cream were among those who formed one pole of my musical life, and I was reassured that my birthplace could supply artists such as Van Morrison with Them and Rory Gallagher with Taste who provided an Irish accent for the Rock/Pop pole of my life.

Going on, too, was the folk revival and The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem and the Dubliners erupted in the 60s; the Chieftains. Planxty and the Fureys came after, surging into the seventies. These titans formed the other pole of my musical world. Linking both, I suppose, was the towering figure of Bob Dylan, who remains, along with some of the artists listed, a formidable and forming influence to this day, as you will hear, no doubt, as you listen to the songs at the core of each entry.

The earth keeps some vibration going/There in your heart, and that is you./And if the people find you can fiddle,/Why fiddle you must for all of your life,/ So writes Edgar Lee Masters, an American poet writing in the late 19^th, early 20^th Centuries. He writes about how this vibration prevents a man from doing anything with his forty-acre farm and how he, because of this vibration, missed out on the joys of everyday social interaction as a result. I, myself, don’t have a forty-acre farm, but a detached, suburban block in an outer suburb of Sydney. I am often reminded that, rather than toiling in this 21st Century version of the smithy, which is a small box-room with its computer, printer, internet connection and assorted musical instruments, I should be outside cutting the grass, tidying the yard, painting the deck, planting a garden, clearing the gutters- and that’s just for starters!

Like most people, I was torn between what I wanted to do and what I had to do to keep the wolf from the door. For years, I felt the weight of Philip Larkin’s poem Toads: Why should I let the toad work/ Squat in my life and for well over four, long, decades I have known that something sufficiently toad-like/ Squats in me, too. But back to the American poet, Masters: he is remembered today for a work that is an interesting amalgam of free verse, epitaphs and monologues from the dead in a cemetery in Illinois entitled Spoon River Anthology.

The poem I am quoting from is called Fiddler Jones and I love the four lines with which he concludes his poem: I ended up with forty acres; /I ended up with a broken fiddle-/and a broken laugh, and a thousand memories, /And not a single regret. In my mid-forties, I helped form a group called Banter playing folk music from Ireland, primarily; but there were lots of Australian songs and tunes in our repertoire, as well. We also featured music from elsewhere in the English-speaking world.

From my mid-teens, I have felt, like Masters, that the earth keeps some vibration going there in your heart and that is you: and, despite a life lived under the toad squatting inexorably on my dreams, I wrote this song about my musical roots: [insert song Let Them Not Fade Away] That has been episode two of the podcast, Letters From Quotidia. In the next instalment I will bounce from the Sea of Moyle which divides Northern Ireland from Scotland to Monterrey on the Californian coast then across the vastness of the Pacific to the Coral Sea washing the shores of North Queensland, so bounce along if you feel so inclined.

Technical Stuff: Microphone- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter

Microphone (for many of the songs) Shure SM58

64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended used for recording and mixing down

Letters From Quotidia Episode 1 Everybody’s Story

A podcast by Quentin Bega

Set out here is the rationale behind the series of letters found in this podcast.

The script of the audio journal: Text found in square brackets and underlined […] is not recorded as part of the podcast but gives information, disambiguation and opinion that may be of interest.

Welcome to Letters From Quotidia – a podcast by Quentin Bega for lovers of music, poetry, and the Crack-[The spelling craic is used widely now, but it is a back formation of the original spelling of the term in English, which the pedant in me requires me to use] that most Irish of nouns which may encompass, news, gossip, fun, anecdotes entertainment, and enjoyable conversation. Quotidia is that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary. Today, we start, not at the beginning- I mean, where’s the crack in that- but somewhere a bit further along life’s path with this first letter, of many, I hope. Here’s Everybody’s Story.

Fifty years ago I wrote my first song. I was 16,[I wrote the first draft of this letter five years ago and had intended to turn it into a podcast then. COVID gave me the space and time to do it rather belatedly] I had pimples, an ambition to be a songwriter, and a cheap, acoustic guitar with old strings and a high action. That first attempt was a parody of country music, which I secretly loved, along with folk music. I was torn between these genres, and the glamour of the rock and pop music of the 1960s and it would be some decades before I finished writing that first song.

If I were an ancient Greek, my name would be Procrastis: “Procrastis is my name and procrastination’s my game.” But I’m not going to play you that particular song- at least not yet. It’ll come later- the subject of another journal entry a bit further on down the line. I wrote the song which figures as the opening track of this audio journal when I was still quite a young man- somewhere in my mid-thirties.

Now I’m retired and an OLD AGE PENSIONER. I’m one of those hated baby boomers- the Gen X’s and subsequent generations will be at work until their seventies cursing my generation for having the good luck to miss the horrors of the Second World War while reaping the benefits accruing while the going was good. Back then, I was thinking about absent friends and thinking about stuff like- “I’m older than Jesus when he was crucified and I’m halfway to threescore and ten- what’s it all about?”

What, indeed! As W H Auden puts it in his wonderful poem inspired by Breughel the Elder’s The Fall of Icarus: About suffering they were never wrong /The old Masters: how well they understood/Its human position: how it takes place/While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…It seems to me that I have been just walking dully along for an awfully long time- hence the title of my podcasts, Letters From Quotidia. It is the summation of an ordinary life in the form of a journal rather than a diary. Each entry will comprise a song I have written over the past half century, supported by a commentary of sorts and a few lines of poetry or prose or drama from artists with the weight of Auden. To make this point a little clearer, I refer the listener to that play by Aristophanes, The Frogs, where the great god Dionysus, who, according to our constant online oracle, Wikipedia, is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking, ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy: he adjudicates a debate in Hades to decide which poet was the worthier candidate to return to Athens in her time of greatest need- Euripides or Aeschylus. To resolve the issue, each poet throws into a pan on a pair of scales a line of poetry to determine which has more heft. In the contest, the older poet, Aeschylus, prevails. In this analogy I see myself as a sort of Euripides, the loser in the contest, whose songs lasting minutes can be counterbalanced by lines of weightier poets lasting seconds.

Euripides was mocked mercilessly during his lifetime by the more conservative among the cultural arbiters of the time. If the term had been current then, they would have reviled him as a post-modernist. His reputation in later ages has not, in my opinion, been as shining as he deserves; Erasmus, according to a dubious source, has him being torn to pieces by dogs, set upon him by enemies. Poor old Euripides had two miserably unsuccessful marriages, and, ironically, another source has him being torn apart by women; although, this seems very close to a scene from his greatest play, The Bacchae, where the king of Thebes, Pentheus, is torn apart by his wife, Agave, and her sister, Ino. Lord, oh Lord: Those ancient Greek women were surely a force to be reckoned with!

Now, some among my acquaintances have hung the label post-modern around my neck. Obviously, in their evaluation, I’m just “froth and bubble” while they, of course, have the solidity of “stone”. It doesn’t really matter which way the scales tip in this matter for judgement, one has to agree with that under-rated 19^th Century Australian poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, quoted by the British Queen in her speech to the Guildhall towards the end of her annus horribilis, of 1992, that “KINDNESS in another’s trouble, COURAGE in your own” is a worthy sentiment.

Narratives generally start at the beginning and move through a graceful arc to an inevitable but aesthetically pleasing denouement. This narrative, though, will avoid the pleasant lie that is the convention. It will start “in medias res” as the ancient Romans would have put it.

The song was written at the traditional halfway mark of life’s journey but imagines a time that is still ahead of me by a decade or two (I most sincerely hope that this is, in fact, the case). The persona in the song is of an advanced age and dwindling wit and may indeed be inhabiting his second childhood. He is speaking to his son. [insert song, Everybody’s Story] That has been episode one of the podcast, Letters From Quotidia. In the next instalment, I will examine formative influences on so many of my Boomer generation in the 1960s, so join me then… if that’s OK, Millennials?

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- (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter; (for many of the songs) Shure SM58, recorded and mixed down using 64-bit N-Track Studio 9 Extended; Music accompaniment and composition software- Band-in-a-Box and RealBand 2020 as well as- for some 20 of the songs of year 2000 vintage- I used a Blue Mountains, NSW, studio. Approximately 48 Banter folk songs and instrumentals recorded live (“in the round”) with a ThinkPad laptop using the inbuilt mic.

Letters from Quotidia 2025 Episode Zero

Letters from Quotidia Revisited 2025 Episode Zero. Be advised that Quotidia is that space, that place where ordinary people lead ordinary lives but where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary. Quotidia is a construct where the Irish concept of the crack is highly esteemed. Crack (craic) may be defined as that most Irish of nouns which may encompass news and/or gossip and/or entertainment, and/or enjoyable conversation and/or music and song.

My hope is that the 282 Letters, each of which was an amalgam of music, literature and anecdote, touched some of the bases mentioned above. But let me now explain the reasons for naming this first of the Letters of 2025 Episode Zero.

First, unlike all the others, these is no song or songs associated with it so for that reason alone it doesn’t deserve a positive integer. Second, it provides an explanation for some of the calendrical oddities that will be encountered in the following thirteen months and one week. I hope what follows, now, is an example of an amusing anecdote. I asked the AI in the Edge browser to come up with the adjective of calendar.

Do you remember my use of calendrical just seconds ago? Usually, when I ask my resident AI something, anything, even when it requires a multi-part complex response, it is back within seconds with more information than you can poke a stick at! But it considered for a minute or more what I thought was just a simple request. I wanted to know if I had made the word up, for a start. Lewis Carroll of Alice in Wonderland fame in his poem Jabberwocky was prone to this sort of thing, as I will demonstrate now:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.//“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/The frumious Bandersnatch!”//He took his vorpal sword in hand;/ Long time the manxome foe he sought—/So rested he by the Tumtum tree/And stood awhile in thought.//And, as in uffish thought he stood,/The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame/,Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,/ And burbled as it came!//One, two! One, two! And through and through/The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!/He left it dead, and with its head/ He went galumphing back.//“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?/ Come to my arms, my beamish boy!/O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”/ He chortled in his joy.//’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/ Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.

And that’s the literature base touched! Oh, and by the way, AI did not satisfactorily give the derivations of the calendar adjective I was seeking. A small victory such as this I find gratifying in a petty but active compartment of my heart.

My final reason for this Zero Letter is that it provides an apologia for rolling out the Letters again. And here the apologia begins: The Letters originally were blogs I put together in 2016 to help assuage the boredom I felt after retirement. I had 120 songs, written and recorded over previous decades. I had also recorded music and songs from the folk tradition of the English-speaking world- Irish, American, Australian, Scottish, Welsh, English- many with the folk group Banter formed in Western Sydney in 1993.

These also numbered 120. So, when the pandemic struck, I used them as the basis for a podcast I started rolling out. This was after writing the scripts to accompany them and after recording lots of stuff during the pandemic year, 2020. So, I had the material for thirty weeks ready by January 2021 and that accounted for 150 podcasts.

After this, my output was not as prodigious. From five posts a week I could manage only one a week for the next 20 Letters. Then I mined some earlier work I had completed years before and the pace picked up to 14 Letters out of 15 weekdays. Then back to one a week for 16 weeks.

And so, it continued with the odd special thrown in on particular days such as Remembrance Day, Anzac Day (which is observed in Australia and New Zealand) and New Years Eve. Between January 2021 and December 2024, these special days provided opportunities for Letters to mark the occasion.

When I decided to reprise the Letters, I just numbered them 1-282 and reposted them in order five days a week, Monday to Friday. So, the calendar for 2025, January 2026 and the first week of February 2026 will not align with specific-day references found in the original posts. I’ll give an example, My New Years Eve post for 2022 will be reprised on 24^th November 2025.

On the off chance that previous listeners to the Letters may wish to hear again one or more of the 282 original podcasts, or, who knows, a new seeker of Quotidian inclination may stumble across the Letters and wish to follow the series, I have decided to play them again; to give them another shot; to gift them another lease on life. Yeah, another lease on life which can mean, an opportunity for renewed enjoyment in, enthusiasm for or appreciation of one’s own life, OR, to make someone feel happy or healthy after illness or sadness, OR, to improve or refurbish something that is worn or old.

Am I referring to the Letters or to myself? Or both? I’m not sure, uncertainty rules as Heisenberg would tell you. Here endeth the apologia. Start revisiting from 6 Jan.

Trailer for Letters from Quotidia 2023- the Podcasts

I know by now that even the most hardened partiers amongst my listeners will have called a halt to the merrymaking, the carousing, the carolling and may well have broken a few, many, most, or, in the extremist of cases, all of their well-wrought New Year’s resolutions. It is, after all, a week and a day into the new year. Now, you will not find me in the least censorious as I have for a long time been a resident of my own fragile glass house.

Instead, may I present a trailer for the ongoing Letters From Quotidia? To preface it I wish to invoke the courage and the wisdom of that great American poet, Walt Whitman, who, in Part 1 of The Song of the Open Road has this to say, which I have adopted (in spirit, at least) for my New Year’s resolution:

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,/Healthy, free, the world before me,/The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.// Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,/Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,/Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,/Strong and content I travel the open road.//The earth, that is sufficient,/I do not want the constellations any nearer,/I know they are very well where they are,/ know they suffice for those who belong to them.//(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,/I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,/I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,/I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)//

From 22^nd of January until 15^th October I will present, God Willing, 20 Podcasts at two-week intervals. They are my old delicious burdens, and I will carry them with me wherever I go- I am filled with them and I will fill them in return! We really do have to thank our poets for sharing the contents of their wonderful minds with us. And I can’t leave this trailer without attaching a song to it as an accompaniment to the poem. The song was the opener on the first LP I ever bought, The Rolling Stones, released on 14 April 1964.

I loved it from the first bars of Route 66 which blasted out of my Dad’s stereo in the front room of our home in Cushendall, County Antrim. I have never recorded or played this song before because…I don’t know! The Stones have a lock on the song in my humble…and I have never felt the need, until now, when such a trip remains, it must be said, a most unlikely outcome- but one which I will not banish to the impossible corner- just yet. Written by US Marine Bobby Troup who didn’t see colour, only soul, according to one of the marines serving under him, it remains one of the finest songs about freedom and the open road. [insert song]

So in two weeks’ time, I will present my first podcast of 2023- see you then!

The Rolling Stones (Troup / Chuck Berry)

[Verse] Song transposed to C

A D A

Well, if you ever plan to motor west

D A

Jack, take my way, that’s the highway, that’s the best

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

A D A

Well, it winds from Chicago to L.A.

D A

More than 2000 miles all the way

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

[Chorus]

Well, goes from St. Louie down to Missouri

Oklahoma City, looks oh so pretty

D A

You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino

[Verse]

A D A

Would you get hip to this timely tip

D A

And go take that California trip

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

[Solo]

A D A E7 D A

[Chorus]

Well, goes from St. Louie down to Missouri

Oklahoma City, looks oh so pretty

D A

You’ll see Amarillo and Gallup, New Mexico

Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona

Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino

[Outro]

A D A

Would you get hip to this kindly tip

D A

And go take that California trip

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

E7 D A

Get your kicks on Route 66

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (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- 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 9 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2022 combo for music composition.

Trailer for Postscripts From Quotidia

Trailer for Postscripts From Quotidia

The Letters From Quotidia are Dead: Long Live the Postscripts From Quotidia!

That great online resource, Wiktionary, defines a bad penny thus: A person or thing which is unpleasant, disreputable, or otherwise unwanted, especially one which repeatedly appears at inopportune times.

Not for me to determine but I hope that this definition does not apply to me. And while the Letters From Quotidia are no more- like that parrot in the Monty Python sketch from TV of many years ago- there is a follow-up series of posts on the way. The next six paragraphs will appear in the first post of the new series. And you will recognise the introductory sting:

Welcome to Postscripts From Quotidia Episode 1 a podcast by Quentin Bega for listeners who enjoyed that Irish phenomenon- the crack! in the 200 Letters and Postcards From Quotidia published between 11 January 2021 and 8 May 2022- Quotidia remains that space, that place, where ordinary people lead ordinary lives. But where, from time to time, they encounter the extraordinary.

So, what is a postscript? Well, my trusty internet dictionary tells me that it is 1) an additional remark at the end of a letter, for example, he added a postscript “Leaving tomorrow.” Or, 2) an afterthought; that is, an extra piece of information about an event that is added after it has happened: for example, “as a postscript to this, Paul did finally marry”. …and, of course, we wish them well!

One or both of these definitions will apply to each the Postscripts. As to how many there will be- I don’t know, but probably more than a few. As to how long each will be- I can’t be sure but each one will, no doubt, be of between 15-25 minutes duration- give or take.

But why? I hear some cry. How much time do you have? I reply.

Short answer is what I had to say when I set up my website on WordPress quite a while back: Quentin Bega was born in the middle of the last century, and then stumbled into the present one with something more to say

One of the wonderful things about the writing game, is that you can, should you so choose, re-visit what you have previously produced, whether to amend, to add, to frankly contradict, or just generally blather on. Unlike life which remorselessly follows time’s arrow- with no going back! So, there you have it- the intro to the Postscripts.

I hope to publish the first of these artefacts sometime before the winter solstice here in Australia- and quite a bit sooner if I can find the requisite inspo (for those in tank tops) or afflatus (for those more accustomed to wearing top hats).

PS(!) As a teaser, I am including a demo version of one of the songs which will feature on the first Postscript From Quotidia. Let Them Not Fade Away. It’s just me with an acoustic guitar.