Joyce Blair

            On Tuesday morning I made some adjustments to my translation of “On n'est pas là pour se faire engueuler" (We Didn't Come Here to Be Shouted At) by Boris Vian so it would fit the rhythm and the music.

            I memorized verse three of “Marilou Reggae” by Serge Gainsbourg, which put me halfway through the song. I almost had the fourth verse nailed down but it kept slipping away.

            I worked on updating my journal.

            Around midday I reviewed all my old Facebook messenger conversations with my daughter Astrid since she moved to Montreal in 2013 and made note of all of the times she’s mentioned the candy I'd sent her on her birthdays and at Christmastime, in order to find out which were her favourites. I made a list and then rode down to St Lawrence Market. I was expecting a line-up and so I’d brought a book to read but I was able to walk right in. I was glad that their washroom was open otherwise I might have peed my jeans. I went into a stall to urinate. There was a guy in the stall next to mine and I guess he'd been there for as while because a security guard entered the washroom and called to him, asking if he was okay. There was a continuous flushing noise coming from the stall and the guy inside said he couldn’t hear him. The security guard told him to use a different stall but the guy inside seemed to mishear. He answered, "I don't know what's wrong! It keeps flushing!" After a bit of back and forth the security guard told him he didn’t have all day. The guy in the stall said, "Okay, okay, get off of my back. They call it social distancing but what it really is is anti-social distancing!”

I went down to Domino Foods in the basement where I bought several kinds of chocolate, gummy and sour candies and combinations thereof. Then I went upstairs to St Urbain and bought a dozen sesame seed bagels. I went to the Sausage King but it was closed, as were a few stores, especially the gift and souvenir shops. I went back downstairs to a Ukrainian sausage place and saw that they had hot pepperettes. I stood there waiting in front of the outer display counter until the young woman working there finally noticed me. She seemed annoyed that she had a customer at all. I asked for three hot pork pepperettes and three jalapeno pepperettes. When she asked for $10 I tried to hand it to her over the display counter but again she seemed annoyed and told me I could come around. It was only then that I realized there was an inside to the store and walked in to the counter where the cash register was.

When I got back to Parkdale I bypassed my place and went straight to the post office in the back of the drug store at Jameson and Queen. I picked out the second smallest shipping box to buy and stood in the long line-up. There were several signs up to make it clear that they were not dealing with cash right now and so were only accepting debit and credit cards. I hoped that their machine worked better than the one at the liquor store that rejected my bank card the previous week. The signs also stressed that they close at 17:00 now and are not open at all on Saturdays and Sundays.

I went home with the intention of packing and addressing the box after a late lunch, but by the time I’d eaten I realized that I was too tired from my ride downtown and back and was going to need to take a siesta. That meant I would miss getting to the post office before it closed.

When I got up I addressed the box, put it together and packed it. I cleaned a magnetic gyro wheel toy that my friend Scooter had given my daughter years ago and put that in the box, along with all the candy. Then I closed it up and put it in the coolest part of my apartment, which is on the shelf by the door, so the chocolate wouldn’t melt.

I did some writing.

I grilled the four sirloin tip steaks that I’d bought from No Frills on Saturday. I had one of them for dinner with a potato and gravy and I also made more scrambled eggs with an onion and made a mess of my cast iron frying pan that it was going to take a lot of scrubbing to get off.

I watched two episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood. These were from my second download and both from disc two and the first season, but the video is horrible and freezes for about half of each episode while the audio continues.

The first story has the return of Sir Richard, who is always getting into trouble that Robin has to get him out of. In this case we find that Richard has a habit of engaging in participation in jousting competitions that he is too old for and which he may have never been very good at in the first place. On a recent joust against two professional jousters the ransom for losing is his horse, his armour and his person or the payment of two-hundred golden nobles. He will have a month to pay it or he will be put in their private dungeon. Richard does not have the money and so his wife Leonia decides that the only way to gain it will be to marry their son Claude off to someone with a dowry. The only person they know with an eligible daughter is Hugh the Mercer, who would need to be impressed considerably with the important people they know. But the only important person they know is Marian Fitzwalter because all of his friends of rank are on the Crusade with King Richard. So they have to arrange for Robin Hood and his men to come and pretend to be important knights. Hugh and his daughter Gladys are invited to Richard’s castle and Robin comes as the Earl of Cloudsdale with his three knights, including Little John and Friar Tuck in disguise. Richard’s son Claude is the artistic type but Hugh needs to be impressed by knightly behaviour and so Robin and Little John pretend to lose in a swordfight with Claude. At dinner two musicians are entertaining the guests but Claude gets frustrated with their playing and plays “Sumer is Icumen in” on his flute to show them how it’s done. The song is also known now as “The Summer Canon” and “The Cuckoo Song”. Suddenly Gladys is impressed and she begins to sing the words. The song is written in Middle English and it’s from the mid 13^th Century, while this story is set in the late 12^th or early 13^th Century, but she sings it I think as “Summer is A’Comin In/ loudly sing cuckoo/ Spring ye wood anew/ Sing cuckoo …” She doesn’t sing the whole traditional song but skips some lines and does a finish. Suddenly Gladys and Claude are in love.

Here’s my translation of the whole song:

“Summer is A’Comin In

loudly sing cuckoo

Seeds have caused the

meadow to blossom

Spring ye wood anew

Sing cuckoo

The calf is lowed by the cow

The lamb is called by the ewe

The buck it farts

the bullock starts

Merrily sing cuckoo

Cuckoo, cuckoo, how well you sing cuckoo

Your song should never be through

Sing cuckoo anew, Sing cuckoo

Sing Cuckoo, Sing cuckoo anew

            When the song is over there is the sudden arrival of the jousting knights to collect their debt from Sir Richard. Leonia tries to stall them while Richard discusses marriage with Hugh. But Hugh wants Robin to marry Gladys. The knights that have just arrived catch Tuck reading a book in Latin and declare him an impostor since no gentleman would stoop to learning to read. One of the knights wants to marry Gladys because of Hugh’s money. Claude foolishly challenges him because he is in love with Gladys. Robin has to intervene and take on both knights. He defeats them and forces them to kiss the hilt of his sword and to cancel Sir Richard’s debt. Hugh tells Robin that he wants Robin to marry Gladys but suddenly Gladys speaks up. She says she doesn’t want a bold warrior. She doesn’t want to be one of those wives who live by themselves and who have to defend their castles against the enemies their husbands have made. She wants a quiet, peaceful knight who likes to do the same things she does.

            Lady Leonia was played by Patricia Burke, who had a long and successful career on the London stage and was also a singer.

            Gladys was played by Jennifer Jayne, who was fairly successful in films in the 1950s and then starred in a lot of Hammer films. She wrote screenplays under the pseudonym of Jay Fairbank.

            In the second story, Rolf, one of Robin’s men goes to visit his mother Ethelreda and breaks the rules by giving her some of the gold medallions he helped to steal. When they meet in the forest a couple who are making out nearby are startled and the young woman thinks that the branches she sees behind Rolf’s head in the moonlight are horns and that Ethelreda is meeting with Satan. The young man runs to look and Ethelreda is gone, with only a toad left behind. They believe Ethelreda is a witch who consorts with Satan. Adding to this is that Ethelreda is in possession of gold and they think she is making it through alchemy. When the sheriff hears of this and that Ethelreda is the mother of one of Robin’s men he decides to encourage the villagers to believe she is a witch by having the cattle poisoned. He knows that if she is sentenced to be burned at the stake then Robin will try to rescue her. At Ethelreda’s’s trial the young couple elaborate considerably on what they thought they saw. Since Ethelreda does not want to incriminate her son she admits to being a witch. But Friar Tuck tells the judge that he should not believe her confession because if she is a witch then the devil speaks through her. If he believes her he is putting his trust in Satan. She is sentenced anyway but the judge’s wife Millicent is upset because she thinks it’s a waste to burn somebody who knows how to make gold. Robin and his men release black cats and toads into the village to scare the people. He shoots fire arrows to chase away the superstitious men of the sheriff and then Ethelreda is freed. He gets the man that poisoned the cattle to confess.

            Millicent was played by Joyce Blair who started out entertaining people in air raid shelters during WWII. She was an accomplished tap dancer and she performed as a dancer with her brother Lionel. She recorded a single in 1963 called “Christine” under the name Miss X. She also sang “Gotta Getaway Now” in the film “Be My Guest”. She was a friend of Sammy Davis Jr.