We own a 7 inch single of the famous duet between Kirsty MacColl (tragically departed) and Shane McGowan (remarkably still with us). But thanks to a certain three-year-old, our record player is currently out of action. So, instead, I downloaded a live recording of "Fairytale", covered by the legendary Irish folk singer, Christy Moore.
He’s singing on his own, so it doesn’t have the back and forth love-hate banter as the MacColl/McGowan version. But it makes up for that with the obvious chemistry between the singer and the audience. The track begins with Christy recounting a (quite possibly fictional) meeting with Shane McGowan:
“Where are you going?” says I. “I don’t know” says he. “Geez, I’m going there too.”
So he took me into Paddy Kennedy’s pub in Puckane into the snug. And he called for a drink. And then I called for a drink. And then he called for another drink and I called for two drinks. And then we sat down and we had a drink.
And old tongues started to loosen up and old thoughts began to flow and he told me a few of his poems and they were marvelous - after a few drinks.
Then I sang a song and he put on the jukebox.Now, transcribing this little monologue probably doesn’t do it justice. But I thought I'd share it, not just because it's been amusing me these past few weeks, but also because of what it illustrates about the nature of human communication.
Listening to the track for the umpteenth time today, I noticed how much is left unsaid. The words are dots and we somehow manage to connect them up to see the picture. The humour comes from the fact that we are left to make those jumps ourselves, that the implications are quite different to what is explicitly said and that, sometimes, we're led astray by our initial interpretation. The poems were marvelous after a few drinks, implying they weren’t marvelous when heard sober. Shane put on the jukebox because he was unimpressed with Christy’s singing. Christy and Shane were not actually drinking their drinks before ordering the next round, but were lining up four rounds before they even started drinking. The implication being that this was no ordinary drinking session.
What’s more, there’s a crowd of several hundred people at the gig, all laughing together at the same points. They’ve obviously all made the same jumps that I did, listening decades later via my iPod.
So much of communication is like this. It’s not just the words that are actually spoken, or even the combination of lots of words. But the context in which the words are spoken, combined with the listener’s knowledge of the world and their assumptions about the speaker’s knowledge. And that's just in monologue. When there are two people having a conversation it gets even more complicated because the context keeps changing.
It's sometimes easy to forget how remarkable the human capacity for communication actually is. When we think about autism, or indeed any other 'disorder', we often take all this for granted. We ask, for example, why an autistic child fails to produce or understand speech, or why an adult with Asperger syndrome might have difficulty grasping conversational niceties. But every now and then, I find myself stopping and wondering, "Geez, why isn't everyone autistic?"
Of course, these incredible feats of mental agility aren't the sole preserve of the neurotypical. I just happen to be focusing on communication skills. In all its variations, the human mind is a truly remarkable thing. We're all amazing.
So here are my resolutions for 2011: I'm going to make sandwiches for work the night before. I'm going to leave work at a sensible time. I'm going to learn to swim properly so that I can have a go at surfing without the near certainty of death by drowning. And I'm going to do less taking for granted and more marvelling at our beautiful minds.
Happy New Year.