Things to do before Christmas: Get tuned in
Get into the right mood with some holiday music.
THE BBC used to air a regular programme every morning called ‘Music while you work’. I believe it began in the war years to keep workers happy while they carried out repetitive, but demanding, jobs like milling parts for aircraft engines or packing parachutes.There were no announcements – just non-stop, cheerful music.
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It carried on for some years after the war and I remember dancing to it and wondering why I got tired before the tune ended. Music that didn’t let me pause for breath for a whole hour was a bit too much for a four-year-old.
I still like to have a cheerful musical background if I’m doing mundane chores. Ironing is best done to military marches or Strauss waltzes; spring cleaning demands The Beach Boys.
Less energetic pastimes, such as cleaning the silver, can be done to baroque chamber music, but I suspect the younger generation would not endorse my choices.
Before we oldies criticise modern pop songs as meaningless, we might stop to recall some of the rubbish of our youth. ‘The railroad runs through the middle of the house’, ‘Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight?’, ‘You’re a pink toothbrush’, ‘We’ve got beans in our ears’ and ‘We belong to a mutual admiration society’ can be surpassed in stupidity only by a song from the previous generation: ‘Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?’
But to get back to the chores before Christmas… You don’t want to grab a CD box that purports to contain party music and find that you’ve got a requiem mass or the Goon Show instead. So put on the disc of your choice and settle down to sort out the rest.
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