. . . . on singing goodbye
I WAS RECENTLY awarded lifetime gratis-and-for-nothing karaoke at my local singing emporium/eaterie Ukiyo in Dublin. This means, in case you haven’t understood the full importance of what I have just written, I am at liberty to indulge in free karaoke for life in private rooms normally rented by the hour for a fee. It is no exaggeration to say that if I had to choose between a Nobel prize and this accolade I would hesitate briefly to make it look like it posed a dilemma and then I would choose the Free! Karaoke! For! Life!
The only other person who has ever been granted this honour probably doesn’t use it much. She may not even know she has it. Ukiyo mythology tells how she was singing with a party of people and then accidentally got locked into the premises overnight, the way these things can happen sometimes. Her lifetime karaoke merit was awarded for chutzpah because in the morning when the restaurant was opened, she acted as though she had not in fact been downstairs in the singing rooms all night pretending to be Bonnie Tyler. She said she was merely there to confirm a karaoke booking for the following week and walked out, head held high. Legend.
I have no such mythical singing-related story. My own award was bestowed somewhat impetuously and out of left field, although I’ve probably put in more man-hours there over the years than most.
Sometimes All By Myself.Literally. I do not intend to abuse the privilege, and anyway, the owner knows I don't get out much and so am unlikely to make a dent in profits. My karaoke partner in chime, Mand, was possibly even more excited than I was at the news. Her original plan was that we move into one of the rooms and have our children visit us at weekends, but then she suggested we meet for a joint belated 40th birthday singing party instead.
It turned out to be the night that her Grandad Carpenter died. She didn’t cancel, she came anyway because she knew us singing together would be healing.
Some might not see how a heartfelt rendition of Everything She Wantsby Wham! has the power to soothe the soul, but then they are probably equally at a loss to understand how achieving perfect harmonies in a duet of I Know Him So Wellis the equivalent of an hour of intense meditation.
That’s just how it is for us.
We sang the Carpenters too, of course. For Grandad Carpenter. And Mand remembered him in between songs. When you don’t have your own grandparents, when they didn’t live long enough for you to have a relationship with them, other people’s grandparents, become entwined in your own experience. It’s why I always loved listening to tales of magical Grandad Carpenter with the Roald Dahl imagination who weaved stories at bedtime that always had an extra addy-on bit for those times when you didn’t want the stories to end. Who knew more about Jung and Freud than Mand’s psychology lecturers. He believed in the golden haze. His theory was that when you died, rather than going to heaven, you went to the golden haze, a place where you understood everything that had ever happened in the whole of the world, all the most beautiful things along with the most evil deeds. The whole kit and caboodle suddenly made sense.
Granny Carpenter, who died before him, had a different theory. She believed in the inn at the end of the universe, a hostelry in the afterlife where everyone you had ever known was waiting with a glass of something to toast you. When she was dying, she made Grandad Carpenter promise to meet her at the inn at the end of the universe if he could tear himself away from the golden haze.
Grandad Carpenter loved keeping Mand’s son James, one of his seven great-grandchildren, in ice pops, and any pocket money he gave out was for the ice-pop fund. So when they went on days out to Malahide Castle or the waterfall at Powerscourt and had an ice pop, they sent Grandad Carpenter a postcard to mark the occasion and thank him. A few hours before Grandad Carpenter died, in a less than picturesque suburb of Dublin, James received yet another Grandad Carpenter-funded ice pop. He jumped up for joy and raised his fist in the air yelling: “Good old Great Grandad Carpenter!”
Martin Carpenter was 87 when he died but among his papers some notes were found for readings he wanted incorporated into his funeral ceremony. He wrote them on his 74th birthday, around the time Granny Carpenter was dying. There was a handwritten extract from the TS Eliot poem Four Quartetsincluding the lines "And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha/And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors/And cold the sense and lost the motive of action./ And we all go with them, into the silent funeral."
He also requested the music for his cremation service, which took place earlier this week. He named the song to be played "as the coffin slides into the furnace". It was a 1968 tune by psychedelic rockers The Move and I am shamelessly using this opportunity to launch a campaign to have it featured on the Ukiyo karaoke playlist; it's called Get the Fire Brigade. Good old Grandad Carpenter.
In other news . . .There’s no fighting the encroaching season now as on Tuesday, Christmas FM returns to the airwaves blasting tinsel-infected tunes 24 hours a day. This year the charity reaping the benefits of premium texts and donations is Focus Ireland. Listen in Dublin on 94.3, Kildare 88.1, Limerick 105.5, Cork 106.7, Galway 89.5 and the southeast region 103.8. christmasfm.ie