Saturday 9 January 2010

73. 10 Songs About Snow

The Snow It Melts The Soonest - James Yorkston
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! - Vaughn Monroe
I Wonder If The Snow Will Settle - Clearlake
Fox in the Snow - Belle and Sebastian
Goodbye England (Covered in Snow) - Laura Marling
Snow Angel - Ron Sexsmith
Pisshole in the Snow - Pernice Brothers
Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
The Last of the Melting Snow - Leisure Society
Snow is Gone - Josh Ritter

Informer!! Anyway ... I can be topical, see. Though these are a rather beautiful collection of songs, snow is lame - I always suspected it and this year has conclusively proved it. It looks nice, but lots of things look nice. Even at school, when everyone got excited about it and would throw snowballs I never had appropriate gloves and I remember trying to throw them with my cricket gloves ... not easy and not fun. And I remember sledging in Gloucestershire and not being able to stop the sledge and going out on to a road and almost going over a cliff and only being able to stop by scraping my hand along the ground then jumping off. Again, not fun, not fun in the snow.
And I don't ski. Never got to go on the ski trips. I kind of hate skiing. As a sport, it's quite fun to watch, I guess, Ski Sunday, Alberto Tomba, Pirmin Zurbriggen, Marc Girardelli, Bode Miller etc but I am a man who loves sport, after all, and there's plenty of sports I prefer to skiing, and skiing as a holiday/culture i always have a mixture of env and contempt for. A bit rich from someone who loves cricket, but skiing hardly transcends barriers of class and finance, does it?
And the number of people who tell me I'd love skiing, and I say, "No, I wouldn't" and they say "I'm sure you would" and I know I wouldn't. And sometimes I say "Well, i definitely won't now i broke my leg" and they say "Oh, that doesn't matter" and I bet they wouldn't ski again if they broke their leg. Fuckers. Ski Fuckers. And skiing is the best use of snow there is. So clearly snow is lame. It means proper sport gets cancelled, it means old people fall over and break their hips, it means children have an excuse to be violent to each other.

Edward built an igloo
bigger than his house
Tom played a snowplough
and knocked it all down

William built a snowman
chubby, smiling, kind
Tom added fingers
flicking the V-sign

Peter laughed and looked on
the snowball that he'd thrown
Tom's ball made Peter cry -
it contained a stone

Richard showed the whole class
his smart and sleek new sled
Tom loosed its screws and
the white snow was stained red

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