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My Brain Hurts!

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We’ve shared thoughts on here before about how ordinary everyday stimuli will make us think of bands, song lyrics etc.. That seems to be a common experience among Afterworders and is hardly surprising given the personality traits that many of us are likely to share.

I shouldn’t think that I am the only person here who cannot hear someone announce they have a theory without hearing in my head (and disturbingly often coming out of my mouth) “Which is mine.” I am from Bolton and frequently refer to it as Notlob or even Ipswich without giving any thought to the possibility that my audience might not have the Parrot Sketch so immediately accessible to their consciousness that they’ll decode the reference. It is something of a miracle that I have never asked for a Dukla Prague away kit as a Christmas present (though I did once request a pair of Joy Division oven gloves) and if you mention that you can see a light at the end of the tunnel I’m likely to suggest that it’s the light of an oncoming train. And so on and so on. I’ve been like this all my life but my brain seems now to be so full of inconsequential stuff that it has little space left for anything else. And, for goodness’ sake, I now have the words Memory Almost Full obscuring my ability to type and an image of an armchair with McCartney’s signature front and centre in my mind.

In short, I am suffering from this malaise to an extent that is troubling. I was keen to read this article in The Guardian as “Freewill” is a subject that interests me. However, it took me an age to read it because, unwanted and unbidden, Neil Peart’s lyrics (I’ll post the song below) interposed themselves into the text more than once a paragraph. I love that song but I don’t think it’s the last word on the subject and I certainly don’t want it to stop me from reading an interesting article just because of the shared subject matter.

Am I alone?

Is there a cure?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/27/the-clockwork-universe-is-free-will-an-illusion

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Comments

  2. My eleven year-old announced that he preferred his steak well done – “Almost grey in the middle” and Mrs Skirky and I simultaneously broke into a chorus of Mike and The Mechanics’ “No Son of Mine”. Neither of us, incidentally, own any work by the Living Year’s Hitmaker, although she did once babysit for Lily Collins. Now, what did I come in here for?

  3. Leicester, after possibly Mark and Lard in the 90s, can never be heard with a ‘Lie-cester-cestershire’ echo..

    (this is a deliberate mis-pronunciation of the East Midlands Metropolis for comic effect, perhaps made by someone from Iowa)

    I too have a head full of automated references I have little control over. Will try and think of some more

  4. I fell your pain. It’s worse for me because Mrs F, who was not raised in the UK, frequently does not get the reference and looks at me like I’ve finally gone doolally. “It’s pre-1984, isn’t it?” she will occasionally ask.

  5. Re: the Notlob reference in the OP, the phrase “It don’t work” said with Cleese-tinged incredulity, has been a standard in my lexicon for longer than I care to remember.

  6. A dog walk rarely passes without the unbidden chorus of “Bag it up baby, love just ain’t enough / I need devotion to, bag it up” of which I always feel Nils Lofgren would be awfully proud.

  7. I drop The Young Ones references into everyday life more often than I should. My poor partner will be out in the garden soon and in my best Neil voice I will repeat “We plant the seed, nature grows the seed, we eat the seed” but not leave it there of course. “No , no you don’t understand. We. Plant. The. Seed etc”. If i’m found with a shovel in my head it’s no ones fault but mine. “Neil, Neil orange peel… “

  8. A good mate introduced me to the glory of Ivor Cutler back in the 80s.
    Somehow, over the years, I developed the habit of using “fremsley” whenever I went to use the word “flimsy”.
    Said mate died a couple of years back and, while your head is full of it in the aftermonths, over time you feel their presence fade, so it’s nice that the fremsley tic still can’t occurs fairly regularly, causing him to pop to the front of my thoughts..

  9. My endless Zappaisms, laconic bits of Derek and Clive, moments of Ortonian archness, and general quotation from the hip movie canon (“The Big Lebowski”, “Life of Brian”, etc), is wasted on my peers, and most definitely on my wife. But it’s the Bible and Shakespeare to me. I am clearly Colin Hunt.

    • Derek & Clive: “is this any way to run a ballroom” was a constant phrase in one office I worked in. Often followed by a 3 part harmony version of “Jump”

      (not the Van Halen song …)

  12. Pythonisms (“all roads lead to Python”), Fawlty Towers, Young Ones, Filthy Rich And Catflap, Bottom, and Blackadder regularly pepper my daily conversations.
    Often to the bemusement of those listening, who often think I’m some sort of looney.
    The one thing that regularly gets confused looks is when hearing a phrase I will respond with the artist, year, and sometimes record label and chart position of a song with that exact (or very very near) title.

    • Oh yes re all of those shows, my day to day speech is riddled with phrases from those, so much so that when my kids caught some of them and heard things like “That is Torquay madam!” “I didn’t get where I am today by…”I yearn to tread the boards…”There was a tiny flaw in the plan…it was bollocks” etc. they gave me some really strange looks. I think I basically AM Colin Hunt.

  14. There is no vaguely philosophical utterance, made for example on the terrace after dinner, with a glass of brandy in hand, that can’t be improved by responding as if the utterer was Phil Daniels in that Blur song.

    Him: “Now the kids have left home I feel this vague one of unease which is not so much ennui as what one might call Weltzmerch, even perhaps a longeur existentiel

    Me: PARKLIFE

  15. Someone at work today said “tell me the answer” and two of us chorused “you may be a lover, but you ain’t no dancer”.

    Kindred spirits!

  16. He’s been out of office for a while now but whenever I heard the name of former UK PM Gordon Brown I always involuntarily blurted out the words “Texture like sun”

    After 700 episodes I can quote The Simpsons in almost any circumstances that come along such as in the summer just gone when I was watching Australia Vs India. The great Virat Kohli got sacrificed running between the wickets and the episode where Lisa took part in a crooked spelling bee suddenly popped into my head. I thought, “Your word is rigged as in “This contest is rigged.””

  18. I find as I get older than more and more people look utterly bemused when I add the immortal phrase ‘as any fule kno’ after I have just said something blindingly obvious.

  19. ‘Well, that’s just your opinion, man’. From The Big Lebowski. Used by me during team calls whenever I’m corrected. Which is virtually constant

    And also from TBL whenever I’m asked a what do you think happened next type of question. ‘He fixes the cable?’

  22. Not exactly in line with the OP, but let me throw this one out there.
    As some of you will have picked up, I’m a train driver and I teach colleagues to drive trains. I was covering route learning with one recently; it’s our equivalent of a taxi driver’s ‘ver knowledge’. And if you don’t ‘sign’ a route, you have no authority to go there, making them places outside of your ken, with no reason to learn about them. I always use the same expression to describe these places – sidings, depots, whole routes in some cases. Until my much younger colleague asked me ‘Why do you keep going on about dragons?’
    If I was to say ‘Here be Dragons’, would you understand it to mean, this is a place to which no man has been and which is full of mystery and I dare not go there? OK, it’s a bit fancy for a description of railway infrastructure, but I find it useful shorthand – and the phrase ‘terra incognita’ is not common parlance in railway dialect.

  23. While eating salmon I have to suppress the urge to make a really stupid joke – I’ve never worked out exactly how it goes, but the punchline is “Salmon chanted “Evening”.” Half my brain is working on the joke, and the other half is going ‘please please please don’t do the tortured pun about a song from 60 years ago that no one remembers.’ This internal dialogue renders me silent and ruins the evening for me (but probably improves it for everyone else.) I avoid the problem by having the steak instead.

  24. The mention of David Bowie (not infrequently around here) brings ‘Michael Jackson, Prince, Tina Turner,…..David Booee,….Van Halen, Madonna, Huey Lewis and the News, the Cars, herbie Hancock, Bonnie Tyler…..Cyndee Looper…’ sample from Mylo’s Destroy Rock and Roll.

    Do listen but I warn you they will be Booee and Looper forever more in your head – they are about 4 and 20 acts into this excellent list of MTV 80s acts

  25. That comment a couple of posts higher up from @chiz (and, by the way, a friend commented recently on how often I refer to something as “a mouldy chiz”) has reminded me of a conversation a while ago when someone mentioned that they had recently visited the Welsh village of Capel Curig. So I said, “What was the traffic like?” They looked at me oddly, said something to the effect that they couldn’t recall any problems and the conversation moved on. And for the next ten minutes, or maybe half an hour, I wasn’t really listening while I strained to find an opportunity to use the phrase “bottleneck at Capel Curig” – the title of a Half Man Half Biscuit song.

    This morning, I was pleased that I controlled myself and asked my son what his plans were for the day when what I really wanted to say was “What’s the recipe for the day, Jim?” in the stupid voice used by “Raymondo” on the JY prog (Jimmy Young programme) many years ago. And no, my son isn’t called Jim.

    If you don’t have the affliction, you may not be aware how often people say, “Here we go,” usually when setting off on a journey. But they do it quite often. And my instant response is “…2, 3, 4.” If the speaker is lucky I don’t carry on and regale them with any more of Jilted John’s hit. But it requires an almost physical effort not to do so.

    A common recent conversation with friends has concerned where we might visit “when this bloody war is over” – a new phrase I seem to have acquired from the WIYE podcast, just as the sound of a police siren makes me want to mention “the sound of young Islington” many years after Mark Ellen stopped making the comment – and more than one person has said they would like to visit Vienna. Which, of course, means nothing to me.

    I fear @Sitheref2409 has now given me an extra possible response to the question “Where do we go from here?” Up to now, that has always triggered an earworm of Marillion’s White Russian which also contains the line. The variety might be welcome but it’s hardly a cure for the condition.

    • Police Sirens. My response is either “He won’t sell many ice creams going at that speed” or a shouted “You’ll never take me alive Cozzer!”

      • As a youngster at football, when sirens were heard, some wag would inevitably pipe up with ‘Ah – they’re playing our tune!’
        As I constantly say to my offspring, ‘It was the ‘70’s!’.

      • In early school days, the sound of twos would instantly trigger a rousing playground chorus of ‘Harry Roberts is our friend….’.

        I had no idea who Harry Roberts was, and neither did most of my school chums I’ll venture, but obviously someone’s dad or big brother was either a villain or a wannabe, and they’d heard it from them and passed it on to peers within the little darlings of Salisbury Road Infants School.

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