A couple of times recently I have used especially arcane references as post titles over on my companion blog, Barstool Blues.
The first, It is true that I do not, I was confident that at least my ridiculously well-read drinking buddy The Weeble would get. It is an archaic turn of phrase much favoured by legendary Irish hero Finn MacCool, as he appears in Flann O'Brien's dementedly brilliant comic novel At Swim-Two-Birds. This character has a poetical bent, and coins a number of brilliant metaphors to brag of his resilience in facing trouble: I particularly cherish I am a hound for thornypaws and I am a tree for windsiege. A great book.
Then, last week, in advertising my evolving plan to conduct an epic bar crawl in Beijing shortly, I proclaimed I have in mind a business. This comes from a programme for the opera Carmen, in a deliriously bad English translation supposedly produced by the Paris Opera many years ago - reprinted by John Julius Norwich in the first of his Christmas Crackers anthologies - which begins "Carmen is a cigar-makeress in a tabago factory" and degenerates from there.
The summary of Act Two is as follows:
Enter Escamilio, a balls-fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: 'We have in mind a business') but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: 'Slop, here who comes!') but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her, but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them.
And, of course, in the last Act the toreadors enter to the rousing song "All hail the balls of a toreador!" Priceless stuff.
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