Just as your woebegone columnist thought he might never smile again (the Brexit decision being so grotesque, so damaging of one's feelings towards Britons) Mrs Woebegone and I came across this cheerful pun on a sign at Lyons Shops.
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It helps to appreciate this if you are old enough to remember the crooner Dean Martin and his greatest hits.
We sent a picture of the pun to a friend we knew was sharing the same Brexit sorrows (he is someone who has even been known to wear an EU badge to work). We know that it helped lift him out of his sadness for a little while because, inspired, he fired back a volley of variations on the theme. They included:
"When our habits are strange and our customs deranged, that's our mores!" and "When Othello's poor wife gets strangled in strife, that's a Moor, eh?" and "When you ace your last tests like you did all the rest that's some more 'A' s!"
Punning is infectious and so we can't resist saying that the mane reason we had gone prowling to Lyons on Sunday morning was for a consoling post-Brexit breakfast at the admirable Stand By Me cafe.
This ethical column never, ever gives commercial plugs for premises but we do commend Stand By Me for being one of those essence-of-what's-best-about-Canberra places where there's a nice little spasm of cosmopolitan excellence in an otherwise unpromising Canberra place. The Lyons Shops otherwise lack charisma.
One of the many virtues of Stand By Me is that diners while they dine listen to vinyl recordings of great pop artists of yesteryear. Sunday's badly-in-need-of-cheering-up breakfast was boosted by the greatest hits of Chuck Berry. Everything in life is improved by Chuck Berry.
Stand By Me (its decor includes big blown-up colour photographs of olde Canberra) is surely named after Ben E. King's greatest hit (1961) of that name. Brexit-dismayed readers who are lucky enough to have partners they dearly love might like to turn to that powerful anthem (in praise of true love) at this ugly time. The words' sentiments say that the singer will be able to cope with any big picture global catastrophe (mountains crumbling into the sea, Britain leaving the EU, the Liberals and Zed Seselja winning on Saturday, etc) as long as the love of his/her life stays constant. http://www.bing.com/search?q=Ben+E+King+Stand+By+Me&src=IE-TopResult&FORM=IE10TR
And while we are trying to cheer up our woebegone nation we pass on a reader's report that she "was idly watching TV last night with the computer-generated subtitles on".
"Reading the subtitles I wondered what "Knickers on a frond" could possibly relate to in the news item, when I realised it meant Nick Xenophon!!!!!!!!!! Don't you love it?"
Yes we do. We doubt that the evocative word "knickers" has ever appeared before in the long history of this wholesome, family column. But here it is at last (the notion of knickers on a frond suggestive of abandoned love-making in the outdoors, perhaps even in that notorious trysting place the Fern Gully of the Australian National Botanic Gardens) in this column's last days.
Yes, some Australians are feeling bitter about England today. But so as to achieve the balance for which this column and my calling are famous we look back now to a pre-Boris time when all Australians adored England.
Our picture is of that dashing WW1 cruiser HMAS Sydney bustling, steaming across the cover of the sheet music for the patriotic ditty (to a march tune) Good Old Australia. The song and its music were published at some in about 1916 and as you read this the sheet music is decorating the National Library of Australia's timely exhibition (marking 100 years since that war) And The Band Played On.
The library illuminates that before the advent of radio, stereos and television, families provided much of their own amusement. And so we can imagine a patriotic Australian family at home gathered around the piano or a cluster of of our warriors together somewhere in France, warbling the stirring Good Old Australia. What they warbled when they got to the chorus was:
"Good old Australia,/Neath skies so blue,/Just tell Old England/We'll see her through;/Tho' foes oppress you/On every hand,/England we'll help you,/Our dear Home-Land."
The library says that And The Band Played On on is a tribute to the abiding value and morale boosting power of music and song to Anzac forces and to wartime Australians at home, as revealed in the library's outstanding collection of vintage sheet music.
And The Band Played On continues in the Treasures Gallery of the National Library of Australia until September 30.
'Good Old Australia' is a wholesome song, which is more than can be said for The Australian Sex Party's just-released The Vatican Can, now available to you (if you're ready to risk your immortal soul) in its elaborate (almost Bollywoody) song and dance version on YouTube.
Irrespective of one's feelings about the policies of the Sex Party this merry piece of atheistic songwriting and choreography, refreshingly blasphemous (Jesus sings along and whistles along from the cross), seems the only creative composition of any kind generated by this election. Certainly nothing in the major parties' shameful old policies and their leaders' hackneyed old speeches have contained anything to make any ears prick up.
What if, years hence, the Sex Party's vivid, toe-tappingly catchy production is the only thing anyone remembers of those otherwise forgettable few weeks of 2016?
