I don’t listen to the radio before 7am. That may seem odd to normal people – I don’t claim to be a normal person – but experience taught me it is best to begin the day with talk radio.
I love radio, it is engaging and a great companion, but I don’t listen before 7am, to avoid any music.
I love music too but know that the best way to ensure not being haunted by a tune or lyric throughout the day is to avoid hearing anything catchy before 7am. It can become such an irritant.
They call it a “worm” or “earworm”, when a tune or lyric enters your head and becomes absolutely unshakeable afterwards. It just doesn’t go away you know. Unless displaced by another.
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This can happen, regardless, even to those of us so disciplined that we don’t listen to radio before 7am. Such as last May in Rome’s St Peter’s Square.
There I was, desperately seeking Irish people to ask them what they thought of the new Pope, when who did I cross but a family from Cork. My cup ranneth over.
They were Patrick O’Regan from Charleville, his daughter Susan O’Mahony and her son Liam from Newtownshandrum, all in Rome for Patrick’s 80th birthday and Liam’s 18th, as Susan explained.
“Ah,” says I, “Charleville. Newtownshandrum. East Cork. Near Killeagh?”
I was referring to the Kingfishr song, then Number 1 in Ireland, but I had no idea of that.
They were from near Killeagh. In fact Newtownshandrum was beaten by Killeagh two months beforehand in a hurling match. And Liam O’Mahony is a member of the Newtownshandrum club. You couldn’t make it up, so I didn’t.
I never heard of Killeagh before the song and have no idea how, when or where I heard it. Yet, even then in St Peter’s Square it was the first thing that came to mind when I met those nice people from Cork.
Many would probably imagine that my mind should have been on higher things, such as the Pope standing on a balcony above. That’s what earworms can do to you.
And Killeagh went on to be Ireland’s Christmas Number 1 last month.
“They’d go raring and tearing and fighting for love/For the land they call Killeagh and the Lord up above ...”
Killeagh, from Irish, for “grey church”.
