Thoughts and ramblings

Marie wasn’t the only historical piper to be ran out of town for poor performance.
During the mid-era of the Penal Laws in Ireland there were a few pipers prosecuted for playing seditious and treasonable melodies. Reminiscent of 1980’s and 1990’s when the broadcast of ‘rebel songs’ were limited on RTE radio and TV by section 31 of the broadcasting act.
One of the pipers, Cornelius O’Brien, was one the last to be actually charged and prosecuted. In 1656 he was given 20 lashes on the bare back and sentenced to transportation to Barbados of all places.

Poor Con would have ended his days as a slave on a sugar cane plantation.
In 17th century Barbados white sunburnt slaves were called  Redlegs,  Redshanks, Poor whites, Poor Backra, Backra Johnny, Ecky-Becky, Poor Backward Johnnie, Poor whites from below the hill, Edey white mice or Beck-e Neck (Baked neck) Unlike the North American slave owners who were red-necks.
In reality the prosecution of pipers and harpists was very rare. Even though Elizabeth 1 is reputed to have said, “Strum, strum and be hanged”, she did have an Irish piper and harpist among her court ensemble. She was a young lass about the town and liked music and dancing  and no doubt her administration in Dublin had better things to do than chasing down pipers and harpists for playing rebel songs. They used to play old clan marches and the original lyrics were composed in praise of the Gaelic Chieftains. After Aughrims not-so-great disaster these songs and marches were banned. But by the 1660’s the lyrics were replaced with songs about the love, war, the weather, the farm, pups, daily life, etc.
Songs of ordinary people. The plain folk. The first folk songs.
The last piper to be prosecuted under the Penal Laws was John Cullinan in 1679. That was more of a drunk and disorderly charge than a crime of the conscious and there’s a silly theory that the Uilleann Pipes were invented in order to get around the Penal Laws but that’s rubbish.

Two hundred and thirty three years later a piper by the name of Touhey found himself in court for being a terrible musician.
He wasn’t really. James T Touhey (cousin of the better known Patsy Touhey) had nodded off on the train on his way home from a gig. The pipes were robbed from under him and he had to fall back on his fairly humble violin playing skills to fulfill the contracted shows. He continued to mourn the loss of his fine set of pipes and sought solace in cheap booze. He was arrested for playing the fiddle, badly and drunk, and his excuse to the Judge was that his pipes were ‘cabbaged’ and he was left in an awful mess.
But in a short space of time he got his act together.
He put an ad in the Jersey Journal on the 21st of July 1911 offering a liberal reward for the return of his ‘Irish bagpipes’ that were reported lost/stolen on June 16th.  He asked the pipes to be returned to his home at 361 Pacific Avenue in the heart of Jersey City, around the corner from Lafayette Park.
Unlike Barbados, it was a nicer place then than now.

Slanta Claws.

My big toe sloped about 50 degrees to the east. A bit like a small armed, huge person hallux impersonator sitting at the end of a cinema row. Large and shouldering the row of neighbours to an odd slant.

To clip the claw? Remove the christmas nail, the slanta claw.