Dear Mr Kershaw by Derek Philpott

Author:Derek Philpott [Philpott, Derek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780993398506
Publisher: Good Day Books
Published: 2016-03-19T04:00:00+00:00

Dear Mr Philpott,

Thank you for your concerned epistle. I’ll try to address your points thoroughly as they are all worthy of examination and, I hope, some explanation.

To address your first issue, it would appear that you have misheard or misinterpreted the final line of the chorus as ‘leave a light on in heaven’. This is quite understandable as you were listening on a (perhaps not perfectly tuned) radio in a noisy motor vehicle. However, the line is actually referring to the fabulous and, I’m sure you and Mrs Philpott will agree, sensuous saxophone of the musical artist Le Valedon who quite literally transports me to heaven with the tender toot of his horn. Unfortunately in the recorded version of the song, I mistakenly pronounced his name ‘Lee Valeidon’ as the typeface on the album sleeve for his lovely ‘Sensuous Sax: The Night’ is unfathomably small and my eye-glasses were in at Gregory Pecks the Opticians being repaired after I had damaged them during a game of Scrabble (don’t ask!). I do apologise for any confusion caused by my amaurotic mispronunciation.

On your second point: This line of lyric has actually been a point of great consternation to me ever since that harrowing mixing session back in the late summer of ‘86 when our wily record producer David Bascombe made the discovery that for every second he cut from a song his mixing time was reduced by around twenty minutes. By reducing the length of the song by four seconds that day, he was able to get home for dinner a full hour earlier than planned, and believe me, Dave enjoys his dinner. Unfortunately while he was callously slashing out four seconds of musical magnetic tape with his omnipresent editing razor he also removed a number of vital words from the lyric. I’m sure you’ll agree that my original line ‘If you want the fruit to fall into your wicker basket before winter takes hold you have to give the tree a shake using the correct gardening tools and wearing the proper protective clothing’ was far superior in every way. Of course none of this was of any concern to Mr Bascombe, who went on to great success producing Tears for Fears’ seminal Sowing The Seeds of Love (which in its original demo version was four weeks long).

If I may refer you at this point to Alphonse Du Breuil’s The Science and Practice of Grafting, Pruning and Training Fruit Trees: Primary Source Edition, you will see that without human intervention, come winter most fruit trees will shed their fruit involuntarily and that man has over the centuries devised countless ingenious ways to beat Mother Nature to the harvest, as it were. Although Monseiur Du Breuil is keen to point out that it’s not the most ideal of techniques, on pages 2135–2139, he goes in some detail into the various methods of ‘shaking’, ‘worrying’ or ‘harrowing’ the fruit from the trees. A small aside, but one worth making, I believe.

Finally, I think issues three and four can be addressed together.

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