[WARNING - A bit of a Friday post...]

I've liked Kirsty MacColl's music for a long time. A bit like with Del Amitri, I liked a lot of the songs without even knowing who sang them. However, since I've stopped listening to The Dubliners "out loud" (after I discovered my daughter was learning to swear in Gaelic, which is not a good situation when you've got Irish in-laws :) I've started to listen to her more and more. However, I've only just noticed the temporal anomaly in the first two lines of "New England":

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song
I'm twenty-two now but I won't be for long

All these years I'd been taking the first line as applying to when she wrote the song and the second to when she sang it, without even thinking that the second line must have been written before she could sing it...

This is actually just one in a collection of things that it took me a long time to notice, in order of increasing embarassing-ness:

  • the German for Thursday is "Donnerstag", where "Donner" is the German for "thunder"; the English is a corruption of Thor's day, and Thor is the Norse god of thunder
  • the "lock" in "air lock" is comparable to a canal lock rather than a door lock
  • Maureen Lipman's character in the BT advert was called Beattie for a reason!