Losing the wheels ... and the will

Yesterday's Guardian Technology supplement did a timely review of the 100 essential websites. Yeah, yeah: the old stand-by when copy is short. But still ...

There was this:

Blogger Fast way to start blogging; training wheels for Wordpress.

Which, in a way, struck a chord with Malcolm (left).

He has become increasingly frustrated by running two parallel blogs: here on Blogger with Malcolm Redfellow's World Service and there on Wordpress with Malcolm Redfellow's Home Service. Increasingly it has come to be an itch analogous to the chicken-pox in Sheldon Harnick's acerbic The Ballad of the Shape of Things:

They say he died from the chicken pox,
In part I must agree: one chick too many had he!

Malcolm prefers the archly-innocent version Blossom Dearie did at Ronnie Scott's club. She also did it for her 1979 Needlepoint Magic album (and if you can find one of those, bank it).

Whitney Lyon Balliett, who had tenure as jazz critic at the New Yorker for some forty years, wrote of Blossom's voice:

without a microphone it would not reach the second floor of a doll's house

The better-known rendering by the Kingston Trio, more burlesque travesty than Blossom's cabaret chanson, is on a YouTube clip:



Onward, Malcolm! To the point!

So perhaps the time has come to switch off the lights, let it all rest, and go away.

Let's admit that Malcolm Redfellow's World Service has served its purpose. It kept the oul' fella out of mischief, and the Alzheimer's at bay for the last three years. It started as a political/historical stream of consciousness, and lapsed into unconscious tics of incidental semi-thoughts.

So, until some future time,

• when he has something to say,
• when he re-fits the wheels,
• and his voice reaches the second floor of the long-term Lady in his Life's doll's-house,

And finally ...



Thank you for that rendition, Ms von Kappelhoff.

Thank you, the handful who occasionally visit here, for your time and trouble.

Good bye. Sphere: Related Content