The Salmon of Doubt

Then, as the historians (a much more interesting bunch than the pedants) tell us, the calendar has been played around with so many times in the intervening years anyway that the whole thing is doubly meaningless. Consider this: we’ve only relatively recently got our time- and date-keeping precisely defined and standardised, with the aid of atomic clocks and suchlike. And on January 1, 2000 (if the doomsayers are to believed) all of our computer systems will go haywire and plunge us back in the stone age (or not, as the case may be). So it seems to me that midnight on December 31 is the only solid and reliable point we have in the entire sorry mess, and so perhaps we should be celebrating that just a little bit. And instead of saying that we have got the end of the millennium (or bi-millennium) wrong, we should say that our ancestors got the beginning of it wrong, and that we’ve only just sorted the mess out before starting a new mess of our own. What the hell does it matter anyway? It’s just an excuse for a party.

But first, to unfinished business.

One particularly niggling piece of Unfinished Business, it occurred to me the other day in the middle of a singing session with my five-year-old daughter, is the lyrics to “Do-Re-Mi,” from The Sound of Music. It doesn’t exactly rank as a global crisis, but nevertheless it brings me up short anytime I hear it, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to sort it out.

But it is.

Consider.

Each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the sol-fa scale, and gives its meaning: “Do (doe), a deer, a female deer; Re (ray), a drop of golden sun,” etc. All well and good so far. “Mi (me), a name I call myself; Fa (far), a long, long way to run.” Fine. I’m not saying this is Keats, exactly, but it’s a perfectly good conceit and it’s working consistently. And here we go into the home stretch. “So (sew), a needle pulling thread.” Yes, good. “La, a note to follow so ...” What? Excuse me? “La, a note to follow so ...” What kind of lame excuse for a line is that?

Well, it’s obvious what kind of line it is. It’s a placeholder. A placeholder is what a writer puts in when he can’t think of the right line or idea just at the moment, but he’d better put in something and come back and fix it later. So, I imagine that Oscar Hammerstein just bunged in “a note to follow so” and thought he’d have another look at it in the morning.

Only, when he came to have another look at it in the morning, he couldn’t come up with anything better.

Or the next morning. Come on, he must have thought, this is simple. Isn’t it? “La ... a something, something ... what?” One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it.

And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on. How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a ... , a . .

.”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.

something ... what?” One can imagine rehearsals looming. Recording dates. Maybe he’d be able to fix it on the day. Maybe one of the cast would come up with the answer. But no. No one manages to fix it.

And gradually a lame placeholder of a line became locked in place and is now formally part of the song, part of the movie, and so on. How difficult can it be? How about this for a suggestion? “La, a ... , a . .

.”—well, I can’t think of one at the moment, but I think that if the whole world pulls together on this, we can crack it. And I think we shouldn’t let the century end with such a major popular song in such an embarrassing state of disarray.

www.h2g2.com .

The Independent on Sunday, NOVEMBER 1999

The Dream Team DREAM FILM CAST: Sean Connery as God, John Cleese as the Angel Gabriel, and Goldie Hawn as Mother Theresa’s younger sister, Trudie. With a guest appearance by Bob Hoskins as Detective Inspector Phil Makepiece.