Reasons to be Cheerful
In praise of very long lists and very big bands
On July 7, 1979, Ian Dury and the Blockheads released "Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3.” It was a response to the near-electrocution of one of the band's roadies while touring Italy. The song is written in the form of a very long list.
“Health service glasses
Gigolos and brasses
Round or skinny bottoms
Take your mum to Paris
Lighting up the chalice”
The long list goes well beyond the items noted above. Ian Dury also asks us to appreciate the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow, equal voting rights, oatmeal for breakfast, cheddar-cheese-and-pickle sandwiches and self-education (“something nice to study.”)
Dury's song was well timed. 1979 was a bad year for the United Kingdom. For one thing, it was the year voters chose Margaret Thatcher for prime minister, which was to lead to the slow demise of social democracy in the country. Yet life was not terrific even before Thatcher took over. The Labour Party leader, Jim Callaghan, had been at the helm during the infamous "Winter of Discontent," during which grave diggers, ambulance drivers, sewage staff and garbage collectors were all in some form of job action. Garbage piled up in the street, notably in London’s Leicester Square (nicknamed Fester Square), attracting rats and other vermin. Bodies started to decompose on the hospital wards as no one came to bury them.
It is now possible to situate 1979 in the long arc of the history of the UK’s deindustrialization, which reached its nadir in the decade prior to Thatcher’s election victory. It was a gloomy moment, when the country seemed to be broken, and Ian Dury was the right man to help lift the mood. Having been left partially paralyzed at the age of seven after battling polio and then enduring great hardship at the Chailey Heritage Craft School for disabled children and Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Dury found solace in the arts—drawing and music. It is striking how many of the reasons in “Reasons to be Cheerful” are references to musicians, artists and filmmakers (Salvador Dali, Dmitri Shostakovich, Smokey Robinson and Woody Allen feature on the list). Dury had a great personal love for the geniuses of the past and present who had brought him comfort and inspiration when he most needed it.
Just over seven years ago, I was climbing the stairs to our second-floor apartment on Rue Island in Montreal. I was exhausted. In addition to carrying my own weight, I now had the added seven-pound weight of our newborn baby daughter, who was asleep in my arms. I navigated the outdoor steps with particular attention. They had been carpeted by the landlord to provide additional grip against the snow and ice. I had recently become fully aware of the hundreds of risks that constituted daily life. I had a freshly honed faculty to imagine the consequences of those risks. One slip, and I could have careened chest-first into the stairs, which would have dashed our baby’s head against unyielding iron, perhaps fatally. Once safely inside, I left our sleeping daughter with my wife in the bedroom. I went to make a pot of tea. When I returned, I saw that my wife was on the bed, having succumbed to an exhaustion even deeper than mine. She and my daughter fit together like pieces of the same puzzle.
Our desk was immediately adjacent to the bed, so I sat down in the office chair and started to scroll through the news on my phone, and then the daylight emptied out and the long night began. Back at the hospital, all three of us had slept in snatches of forty-five, sixty or ninety minutes, never longer. The current slumber was the longest stint of peace since before the water had broken. But I felt no compulsion to sleep. I opened my laptop and started to write.
When I was seven, I wrote, my father came into the living room one afternoon to make an unexpected announcement. This would have been when just the two of us lived together on a small industrial estate at the periphery of a Midlands town. My father interrupted my aimless fiddling with my Lego, telling me to sit down on the settee and listen carefully. The previous day, he said, my mother had asked everyone on her hospital ward for a cigarette. She had even asked the doctors and nurses. But no one had any, and so she exited the hospital in search of her nicotine fix. At this moment in his story, my father forced a smile. It was a smile that I would see often, a hint of sympathy for someone in the grip of a compulsion that was unfathomable to him.
She walked out of town and into the hills, he said. She went a long, long way on her search, and still she never found any cigarettes. At last, she came to the edge of a quarry.
“What’s a quarry?” I asked.
“It’s a place where men dig for precious minerals and rocks. It’s a huge pit in the earth,” replied my father.
I was always filing away new words in the archive of my mind and so I found a place for this one, too. Quarry. My mother’s footsteps, said my father, were unsteady as she approached the quarry’s edge. She fell in. A fall of that height was a very serious matter. A passerby, out walking her dog, saw the body hurtle downwards. The passerby was too far away to be able to do anything to help. My mother was killed instantly.
In my nascent manuscript, I was following in my mother’s footsteps—not to the quarry in Wales, but along the streets of her hometown, Wallasey, on the Wirral peninsula, south of Liverpool. That morning, Nana had given me a map and shooed me out of the house. I was seventeen, on the verge of eighteen, and she had made the faulty assumption that I, having lived on the other side of the Atlantic for four years, would want to play the urban explorer and go into town and visit the Cavern Club, where the Beatles used to play, and the historic port, where the Royal Liver Building stretched up over the water like a throne. But I was far meeker than Nana took me for, and worse, I was addicted to cigarettes, just as my mother had been.
I walked around Wallasey, in and out of newsagents, and everywhere that I asked for my mother’s brand of cigarettes, which was also my brand of cigarettes, I came up empty. I gave up. I became convinced that I would never find my mother’s brand of cigarettes in Wallasey. Perhaps I would find them in Liverpool proper. I made my way to the train station, where I climbed a short flight of cement steps to the top. There, on a brick wall, a poster greeted me. It was a picture of a stern man in uniform. He was glaring at me. Underneath, the text said: DO NOT TAKE THE TRAIN FOR A RIDE. I heeded the warning immediately, turned around, and descended the steps. A faint drizzle started up. I kept following the streets, which seemed to meander in angular loops, going nowhere specific, until I felt that I was so far away from the ancestral home where I had started out that I would probably never find my way back.
I stopped at another newsagents. If I cannot find my mother’s cigarettes here, it’s hopeless, I told myself. I stopped at the desk where the clerk was doing some sums on a foolscap piece of paper. He looked up, and his eyes were just as stern as those of the man on the poster at the train station.
“What will you be having then, young man?” he asked.
He could see I was devoid of purpose and confidence. I stammered out the name of my brand—my mother’s brand. “Sorry, can’t help you there, lad,” he replied. I turned to the rack of magazines. My eyes flitted all the way to the top where someone of full height, such as me, could easily pull down one of the magazines with women’s come-hither smiles and naked breasts. I let my eyes be dragged downward to the respectable broadsheets, and I picked out a copy of The Independent.
“I suppose if I can’t smoke, I’ll read,” I said to the clerk.
When I parsed out the sentence in my mind afterwards, it made no sense. It didn’t hold up as a joke. It didn’t carry any significance as an observation on life. The clerk seemed to be staring me down, daring me to lose my nerve. I had to do something to lift my spirits.
When I had been very young, about the same age Ian Dury was when he was stricken by polio—the same age, now that I come to think of it, as I was when I lost my mother—I used to watch Doctor Who every week with my father. The Doctor, played by Tom Baker, brought levity to every fraught moment by offering people jelly babies. There is a scene, for example, in which he intercepts a down-on-his-luck criminal who is trying to evade the law, and the criminal’s clear plan is to jump off the side of a building. There he is, right at the edge of the roof, and Doctor Who approaches him and says: “Somehow, I get the impression you're trying to kill yourself.” The criminal says, “It's the taxes.” “Oh, my dear old thing,” replies Doctor Who. “All you need is a wily accountant... Would you care for a jelly baby?”
In front of the withering eyes of the clerk, I reached toward the large jar of jelly babies on the counter and announced my intention of having a dozen. “Don’t grab at the sweets, lad,” the clerk said. “Hygiene? “I’ll do that for you!” He took off the lid and used a special metal scoop to lift a dozen, which he tucked away in a small paper bag. Then he used his pencil and the foolscap piece of paper to add up how much I owed him. I exited his shop with a jelly baby in my mouth, determined to keep it there as long as I could.
The cause for cheer always seems so small and insignificant compared to the scale of the troubles you’re up against. What’s a little jelly baby compared to crushing financial debt? Yet the genius of Ian Dury’s very long list is that, even though jelly babies don’t feature on it, there is doubtless at least one thing on the list that would appeal to pretty much anyone. That is to say, the specificity of the list creates something universal—a reminder of how many remarkable things, big and small, that are are available to us in this world.
“A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You’re welcome, we can spare it — yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 — no electric shocks.”
I continued my journey through the streets of Wallasey. Finally, the pubs opened. I entered one, greeted by the warmth of a fireplace and the smell of decades of overbrimming beer, and I sat down at the bar and spread out my copy of The Independent. The barmaid approached me and said, “What’s your poison, love?”
NOTES
3 May, 1979. BBC Politics
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/background/pastelec/ge79.shtml
"Then was the winter of our discontent,” Anne Perkins. BBC News.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7598366.stm
Ian Dury, Biography
https://iandury.co.uk/biography/
"Ian Dury & The Blockheads : Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3)." The Immortal Jukebox: A Blog about Music and Popular Culture https://theimmortaljukebox.com/2019/02/26/ian-dury-the-blockheads-reasons-to-be-cheerful-part-3/