Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . .
Believe it or not that was my dad’s favourite song. he used to sing it all the time when we were kids.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi
I had no idea what it was about. Neither did my sister. neither did my dad. what even is a bassman? I was too young to know much about music. I just thought it was a man who really liked skirting boards.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too.
I think he only sung it to us because it had weird sounds in it. The only other song he sang a lot was I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. no time to say hello goodbye I’m late I’m late I’m late. But Mr Bassman. Oh, Mr Bassman was the thing.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too. Bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-bur bur
I was listening to the radio. It was Sounds of the Sixties presented by Brian Mathews. (‘This is your old mate Brian Mathews saying, that’s your lot for this week, see you next week’). And he said, The next song is from 1961 And it was a minor hit for Johnny Cymbal and it’s called Mr Bassman, and seriously, it was like a kick in the goolies.
And the song started. and the song played. and the song came out of the radio and all this time I’d thought it was just a song that my dad had made up and all the time I thought it was a piece of genius that my dad had made up and I tell you that a small piece of my childhood suddenly dissolved.
but the more I listened, the more I thought, oh, he’s doing it wrong. Johnny Cymbal has cocked it up. Johnny Cymbal is singing the wrong words. This is nothing like the song my dad used to sing. this is not how the song goes. this is not how the song goes. THIS is how the song goes.
Oh Mr Bassman, you’ve got that c-certain s-something when you go . . . A-aye yi a-aye yi aye yi I wanna be a bassman too. Bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-b-bur b-bur bur BUR BUR BURRR B-B-B-BURR BURR!
(Pause).
Anyway, Just thought I’d tell you that. I’d better be off, now. I’d better be off.
With a sonnet so perplexing as this, there only seemed the one course of action: to call in the literary investigator, Professor Zazzo Thim.
He asked for accommodation on the second floor, where he might afford a view of the lawns and the sculptured hedgerows. He said he wanted to see a peacock. He said he had never seen a peacock, not a real one. I reminded him of the bad sonnet, that he had a duty to perform. I want to see the peacocks first, he replied, dropping his bags in the hall and rubbing his hands together with glee.
I reminded our guest that he had a job to do, that he had been promised a quite substantial sum to analyse the sonnet we had uncovered in our renovating of the library.
“Yes”, he said. “Yes, of course, how silly of me to forget. I am here for a specific reason and your hospitality should not be taken for granted”
The old man was taken to his room and I repaired to the library, expectant of his appearance therein. It was a crisp autumn morning and a mist rolled in from the vales across the lawn in front of the french windows. As a devotee of literature in all its forms, I had been intrigued to discover the sonnet in a notebook hidden in a crevice between two shelves and I was anxious that the work be scrutinised. that any literary merit might be deduced from its faded pages. Upon inquiry as to who might best carry out this investigation, I was told that Professor Zazzo Thim was at the very top of the profession, and I spared no expense at securing his services. I looked out on the mist-shrouded gardens with my hands behind my back, expectant and looking forward to the knowledge that he would impart, only to see his decrepit form ambling across the eastern lawn in hot pursuit of a peacock, waving his arms in the air, and hooting with delight.
Over dinner he showed no sign of his exertions. He leaned his padded elbows on the edge of the table and grinned at me. “You know”, he said, “This whole place exudes a certain atmosphere. I can tell that there might be more to it than just the one sonnet. I fear, my friend, that this whole building might conceal a wealth of literary surprises”.
“How so?”, I asked
“It has a certain feel to it, the same sensation I get when I walk into a library for the first time, or museum, or even a bookshop, and sense that words have been played with here, that language has been exerting itself, contorting into new and uncomfortable positions for the benefit of general entertainment”. He then grinned, and leaned closer. “And another thing”, he said. “You’ve got peacocks here”
“And what of it?”
“Peacocks congregate around places where sonnets have been written. It is a well known fact in the literary community. Wherever you see peacocks, there have been works of great power created. The peacock, you see, operates on the premise of sonic reverberations, and, in particular, the beat created by iambic pentameter. Mark my words, young sir, there are sonnets in this house!”
That next morning we met in the library and I showed him the notebook I had found during the renovations. He sat down next to the fire and, with a quizzical expression on his face, began to examine it in detail with a magnifying glass. The wood crackled and spat, and I stood there, awkwardly, with my hands behind my back. The old man was a sight in himself, every facet of his aged countenance concentrated upon the page, his thin, bony legs crossed at the knee, the long, slender fingers holding the magnifying glass daintily, as if he might lose all thread of his conscience if he were to hold the handle too tightly. At long last he turned to me and he said:
“It’s a sonnet”.
“I know! I know!” I could not help the tone of exasperation in my voice, for I had long imagined this moment.
“Ah”, he said. “You mean, you want me to analyse it in some greater depth?”
“Yes!”
He gave a great sigh and leaned his head back in the chair. “That could take some time”, he said.
“Is this not what I am paying you for? You may have all the hospitality you need, but I want a thorough dissection of this poem so that we might know exactly what it is about, where it came from, and what it means for the history of this house”.
“Fine”, he said. “Give me ten minutes”
I went for a walk around the gardens. The winter chill bit into me and I pulled the coat around my shoulders. The old man was plainly mad and I wondered if he really knew what he was doing. The university department, it is true, had seemed glad to be getting rid of him for a while, or at least, that was the impression I had received from their eagerness to unload him on me. Yet he had not come without his plaudits. I had entered his name on a search engine to find a list of credible achievements in the field of literary extremism, as well as several spoof web sites in which his methods were derided and mocked by affectionate ex-students. The more I thought about him, the more I told myself that he was a gentle man, an eccentric devotee of literature who would, I was now certain, get to the bottom of the mystery of the sonnet.
At this moment I heard a strange hooting sound. I turned a corner to see Professor Zazzo Thim, his arms outstretched, inches behind a peacock, which appeared to be running for its life.
We met again that night over sherry in the grand hall. “I must say”, he told me, “I was surprised and enthused by the sonnet. It is a peculiar work, but it fits all the criteria of a Petrarchan sonnet, with a rather perplexing turn and a couple of cheekily-placed caesura, and a rhyme scheme which lends it a certain credibility. Yes, my friend, you have a sonnet and I think you should be proud of it”
“I am glad”, I replied. “I feared it may have been nothing but a cheap imitation”.
“It is a fine work, which, within its lines, compares the love of a simple country boy for a young milk maiden, for the simple joy a cow feels upon milking. Some of its imagery could be seen as quite daring for its time.”
“Such as?”
And now the Professor quoted, “How joyously, betwixt thumb and forefinger, the teet is squeezed”.
“I see”
“But my friend, there are greater mysteries here, are there not?”
“What do you mean?”
“The peacocks, I note, are particularly agitated in my presence”
“Perhaps that’s because you keep chasing them all over the place”.
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing”.
As I was saying, the peacocks , perhaps knowledgeable of my literary credentials, are loath to let me into certain pars of the garden as if they are protecting something. Have, you ever noticed this before?”
“I can’t say that I have”.
“It is a quite odd manifestation, and I think it should be investigated at this moment. You see, it is my prognosis that the peacocks are protecting another sonnet, perhaps one of such magnificence that its iambic pentameter powers them and keeps them agile in these autumnal frosts. Surely, by now they should be deep in their hibernation”.
“Peacocks do not hibernate!”, I told the old man.
“Then you see, they are being energised by something beyond our control.”
At this, Professor Zazzo Thim pulled on his jacket and slugged back the last of his sherry. “Come, he said, “We shall investigate this moment!”
Indeed, his enthusiasm was infectious. We left the grand hall and, by way of the main front door, entered the grounds of the house. Zazzo led the way, despite the cold, and a frost which had already begun to form on the lawns, a sparkling white which lent an ethereal splendour to the night. How strange that the peacocks should still be so restless, and not confined to their winter hut. For the first time I started to believe that the Professor might even be correct in his assessment, that the peacocks were hiding something, that they didn’t want us to proceed any further.
The gravel paths crunched under our footsteps and the lawns were hard with frost. The Professor was fearless as he pushed his way through the peacocks, their tails fanned as if in some attempt to halt our progress. And it was so cold, down in the hollow where the ornamental gardens were laid, a strong coldness which gripped my body and chilled me right to the bone. Our breath turned to vapour in the light from the torch, while the peacocks followed us down the hill, constant footsteps in our wake. At last we turned a corner to find a barrier of them blocking our path, their tails fanned, an impenetrable wall.
“What should we do?”, I asked, now fully reliant on the old man.
“We must do as they want”
“But we might risk the whole project!”
The beady eyes of the peacocks bore down on us, and, as one, they started to call, their shrill exclamations bouncing back at us from the shrubbery, from the trees and the bushes of the ornamental garden. A cacophonous moment, both frightening and sublime, and, with a force I had never seen before, they guided us, gently but persistently, into the entrance of the maze.
We were running now, running with them right behind us. We couldn’t stop, there would have been no option but to be pecked to death by their beaks. We turned corner after corner in the maze, the scampering feet of the peacocks just inches behind us, until, as if they had guided us, we were in the very centre, the small statue of my great, great uncle which marked the epicentre of the maze.
And there we saw them, hundreds of them. Peacocks lined around the hedges, as if in parliament, and were in the middle of them, just us and the statue.
“This is it”, I whispered, “This is the end”.
“On the contrary”, the Professor replied.
He bent down and began to wipe his hand along the wording on the plinth of the statue.
With a beating heart, I saw as the moss and the dirt began to be flaked off, and a poem be revealed to us, centuries old perhaps, yet persistent in its survival. The peacocks began to crowd around. The stone letters, so regular and formal in the light from our torches, archaic in their construction, their sentence structure.
“A sonnet!”, I breathed.
But the Professor was frowning. He crouched down and worked his way around the plinth, reading as he went. “It has a rhyme scheme”, he said. “And a ceasura, and a definite turn between the sixth and seventh lines. Yes, a sonnet, but….
By now, the peacocks were crowded in on us, as if they, too, were trying to read.
“But what?”
“There’s a syllable missing in the ninth line”.
“Read it to me!” I urged The Professor bent closer.
‘And yet my old heart it be not saved””.
“Nine syllables”, I whispered, counting them on my fingers.
The peacocks were pushing against us now, evil in their intent, crowding around, and they could surely have crushed us if they had the inclination.
At this, the Professor reached into a pocket and pulled out a chisel. And then, using a rock to hit the top of it, carved a small accent over the ‘e’ of ‘saved’ to transform it into ‘savèd’.
The result was instantaneous. The peacocks drew back, satisfied, then began to file out of the exit, allowing us to follow them into the cold night, from where they went back to their winter hut for hibernation.
The Professor and I returned to the Grand Hall and helped ourselves to another sherry.
He left the next morning and I was more than happy to cough up the extra money he demanded from his extra investigations. How happy we both were, to have solved a little mystery and put right the travesty of a bad sonnet. I thanked him once again as he clambered into the taxi, and as it pulled away he rolled down the window and he waved, smiling. His last words to me were:
“The peacocks shall bother you no more”,
I went back to the library and looked once again at the poem l’d found, the old notebook, now so faded as to be hardly recognisable.
I counted down the lines. “Hang on”, I said, to myself. ‘This isn’t a sonnet! It’s for fifteen lines!”
Between the late nineties and the mid 2000s, I wrote hundreds of short stories. This was a very hectic time in my life, and probably needlessly so. In 2000, I moved into a gothic flat near the seafront in Paignton, almost directly over the road from the shop where I worked. I was studying Open University every morning, getting up at 5, studying 6-9, going over the road and working 9-5, then home, and spending every single evening writing short stories. On my day off I’d attend a Writers’ Circle and it soon became apparent that the other attendees seemed drawn to my funnier stories. In one story, I invented a character, a professor of literature by the name of Zazzo, and soon the other members of the writers’ circle started saying things like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see what Zazzo gets up to next week!’ My Open University degree was in Literature, so I’d have to watch a lot of videos (it was still videos back then), and listen to lots of cassettes presented by these eccentric academic types who were a million miles away from the milieu in which I moved. I saw Zazzo as belonging to this community, perhaps barely tolerated by his contemporaries, and often shooting off at a tangent, seeing patterns where there were no patterns, narratives where there were no narratives. Zazzo was a literary investigator. Whenever there was a mystery with a literary element, Zazzo would be there. Skateboarders quoting Shakespeare for no reason? Send in Zazzo! A crab routinely predicting the winner of the Booker Prize every year? Another case for Zazzo! The discovery of yet another Brontë sister? Who do we call? Professor Zazzo! The Zazzo stories were saved on various floppy discs, and then promptly forgotten about for twenty years. I had no way of accessing them for quite some time, but now, thanks to various technological developments (and some paper versions I recently found), Professor Zazzo has been saved from obscurity! My life has moved on since those days. I’ve been working as a comedy performance poet since around 2008, and worked on various other projects, so it was a delight to rediscover this strange world. And I really hope you might enjoy reading some of the stories which I shall be publishing on this blog.
As the train pulled into the station, Professor Zazzo Thiim felt a twinge within him, deep down where he knew his heart should have been. He didn’t want to be there, he knew what was waiting for him. It was here, this very place where, years before – decades before! – he had given his infamous speech in which he had proclaimed the death, as an art form, of the short story. There had almost been a riot.
But the Professor was a sentimental man, and when he had received, in the depths of the University in which he taught literary experimentalism, a letter from a middle-aged lady who had witnessed him that day, fleeing for his life amid the baggage trollies and the tourists, pursued by an angry mob, he knew he had to go, just for old times sake. How lucky that he had given them the slip on platform sixteen, he thought to himself, as the train slowly navigated the last few inches of the track. Would anybody recognise him now, all these years later?
The grand old station was the same as it ever was. The glass roof was a dirty grey, matching the overcast skies outside, while the rusted superstructure was plastered with pigeon droppings. Zazzo pulled his coat collar around him as he stepped off the train on the worn tarmac of the platform. He felt a coldness in the air, an eternal coldness, as if all the emotion from the thousands, the millions of journeys begun and ended here, the lives separated, the people who would never see each other again, had somehow become crystallised and manifested just in him. The Professor began to shiver.
She was waiting for him at the exit of the platform, next to the aerodynamic train engine which throbbed and sizzled as it recovered from its journey. She recognised the white-haired professor from the photographs on the jackets of his various, little-read volumes on the literature of Greenland and the cultural significance of the Haiku in Guatamala. (Verdict: virtually none at all). She stepped forwards and extended her hand, then helped him with the big bag slung over his shoulder which contained the manuscript of his latest novel. They went to the station cafe.
“We talk about it even now”, she said, over a cup of coffee which steamed gently in the slant of morning light.
“I didn’t realise it was such a big event”.
“Big event?” she asked. “It was the only event”
The cafe was filled with travellers, youths with backpacks, old ladies with small trollies, all of them static for this one moment in time before they each went their seperate ways to the furthest corners of the continent. Behind the counter, the coffee machine let off a cloud of steam which moistened the ceiling, while a small radio played jazz in the kitchen. The saxophone made Professor Thim feel sad, though he didn’t quite know why. Something about the passing of the years, perhaps.
“You certainly caused quite a stir” the woman said. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Mathilda, and the day I saw you leaping over the tracks while being pursued by that mob, l was employed in the cigarette kiosk. I remember it now : your scarf trailing in the wind, the papers of your speech flying away behind you, the angry mob piling over baggage racks and the barriers like ants coming back to their colony. Nothing stood in their path! You started a change in me…”, she said, contemplatively.
“What do you mean?” the Professor asked.
“While I was working that morning I was listening to your speech. When I saw you set up on the main concourse with a soap box and a sheef of papers I thought you were just another religious nut, or maybe one of those hopeless politicians. But when you started speaking about the short story, and speaking so eloquently, I might add, I became entranced. I remember it to this day – the way you said that short stories no longer mattered, that we were all philistines because we preferred trashy novels or the television, that all writers of short stories are, in some ways, the chroniclers of the modern world, capturing moments and emotions in subtle
ways which other means can never attain. I remember the way you used to adjust the scarf around your neck as you talked, your face wrinkled in concentration. I was so captured by this! I couldn’t concentrate on my job, and when these people started crowding around you and heckling, I thought – a-ha! He has struck a nerve!”
“It’s nice that you remember” “, the Professor said, fingering his collar where the scarf would have been. He remembered the scarf, he still had it at home, somewhere.
“So I went home and I started to read short stories. Nothing major at first – romance, a bit of light comedy. Then I progressed to Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Chekov. After a few years I wanted more, so I started on James Joyce, Italo Calvino, even dear old Franz Kafka. Borges came next, of course, the master of them all. And now…”
“Yes?” the old man asked, fearfully.
“Now I’m reading Samuel Beckett”
“My word” , he whispered
“And it’s all thanks to you. My life has been enriched by that moment, by the passion and the fury of that one episode. I resigned from the cigarette kiosque, enrolled in university, and I began to acquire literary ideas of my own. Do you know what it means for a character to appear in a short story, for example? The characters believe themselves, for just one moment in time, to be so important as to be forever captured in the reader’s mind, and lodged there forever. Yet they do not have the longevity, the life-span of characters from, say, a novel. Such animosity exists between them! The moment in which they exist is so precious, so pure and concentrated that they could never last a whole novel with the same intensity. Just look at ourselves – if we two were to last a whole novel, we would be exhausted by the end of chapter three”
The Professor nodded, solemnly.
“I have so many ideas inside of me”, Mathilda continued. “And it’s all thanks to you. So when I read a textbook on the use of penguins in the shorter fiction of Virginia Woolf – (in which it was concluded that penguins hardly featured in any of her work) – and I saw that the author was a certain Professor Zazzo Thim, who, years before, had almost been lynched right here at this very station, I thought: T’ have to find him, I have to thank him personally for the life he has given me'”.
The Professor fingered the clasp of his briefcase. He felt so many different emotions. “I’m glad”, he whispered, above the soft saxophone solo from the kitchen. “That I have made an impact on someone’s life”.He opened the briefcase and pulled out a manuscript. “In fact”, he continued, “I would like you to have this . .”.
“What is it?” Mathilda asked, laying an expectant hand on her chest.
“My latest academic work, explaining the death of surprise endings in short works of fiction. It is my belief that all surprises have been eliminated, that nothing more can ever be said at the end of a short story which may shock or confound the reader. I have called it, ‘No More the Lonely Badger'”
“I’m touched”, Mathilda said. Zazzo passed the manuscript across the table towards her and she took it in her quivering hands. “No more surprises”, she whispered, reading the sub-heading. “An investigation by Professor Zazzo Thiim”.
“Just one more thing”, he asked. “Why did the crowd react so badly to my speech? Why did they set about me in such a hostile manner? Surely, the people of this city don’t care that much for the short story as to attack me personally, just because of my hypothesis? I’ve thought about it for the last forty years, I’ve thought about the effect I had and the passion they displayed, you see, and it, too, changed my life, it changed my ideas, and I started to devote my life to demonstrating that short stories do make a difference, and I have used the episode as an illustration in lectures, academic works and after-dinner speeches. Indeed, it could be said that my whole career has been based on this one incident! So tell me, why was the crowd so incensed?”
“Didn’t you know?”, Mathilda asked. “It was your scarf. They thought you were a United supporter.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Put some feta cheese in there, Put some Camembert in there Put some other things in there It's very very quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Bought it from a man from Bern The man from Bern his name was Bern Fridge freezer, Swiss geezer So so quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
Have you turned it on? Of course I’ve turned it on. Have you plugged it in? What am I, daft or something?
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went witty witty woo The old one went chigga chum chigga chum The old one went to the tip.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. The new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet. I don't want to cause a fuss And I don't want to cause a riot But the new fridge freezer is suspiciously quiet.
As 2025 lumbers to a wimpering snuff, many of us see a world that seems almost unrecognisable to the one we’ve always known. Division and hatred, thinly veiled racism, outright transphobia, and the prevalence of the ego have combined to create a cultural environment in which core principles of neighbourliness and humanity have taken a back seat. Other and better writers have written about this and to much greater effect. It’s hard not to see our lives, dominated as they are by so many distractions, and consumed mostly by looking at a screen or a mobile phone, as being the primary reason for this. But I’m not a psychologist. Nor an analyst. I just believe that it’s so much easier to tell a lie than it is to disprove it. And quicker, too. Do I despair of the world? All I can say is that people get bored very quickly. They want instant gratification, and now. The shock of the new.
As for me, 2025 has been, well, unnecessarily interesting. I’d had a good life for the last fifteen years, writing and performing poems while working in my job, in retail management at the same branch of a charity for almost thirty years. 2024 was marked by the drug dealers who lived in the flat above my shop. There were frequent fights, arguments, knives, needles, gangs of ne’erdowells to contend with, all happening right above the shop. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, and then, all of a sudden, it did. In February of this year, the drug dealers upset someone, (an ex-girlfriend, apparently), who then announced on social media that she was going to burn down their flat that very evening. (Incidentally, this was Valentine’s Day. How symbolic). So the drug dealers did the right and humane thing, and moved out for the night taking their possessions with them. I watched them go through the security peephole in our back door. They loaded their possessions into a car. I hope they don’t burn the place down, to cover their tracks, I thought. So it was no surprise when I got a phone call first thing the next morning to say that the shop had burned down.
Yes, it was arson. But now I found myself in a tentative position. Would I still have a job, especially in the current financial climate? What would happen to my staff, would they still have a job? The company could very well have ‘let us go’ then and there, but they were understanding. I was made into a floating manager. My job was now to travel through the south west and cover at any branch where a manager was absent. Over the course of 2025, I worked in almost every town you can think of between Bournemouth and Cornwall. Some of them I thought they’d just made up. (Midsomer pNorton?!). I spent a lot of 2025 living in hotel rooms and eating buffet breakfasts. So yes, I still had a job.
But it was my performing which suffered. I could not commit to gigs because I never knew where I was going to be staying or working. I could not rehearse, because I used to use the shop to rehearse every single morning while I was getting the place ready. I couldn’t learn lines, especially in a hotel room. I had a few wonderful gigs which I had to book time off for, including Penzance, and a quick trip to Edinburgh. I had a good enough time.
The one thing I did, though, was to work on a novel. I’d already written the first draft when I applied to Curtis Brown Creative, and amazingly, I was let on the course. Over the summer we developed the novel, and it’s looking very good indeed. I am now tinkering with it and hoping that an agent or a publisher sees enough in it to accept it. I’m very happy with it, indeed.
This last month, I was made temporary manager of the shop in Torquay. This is much closer to home, and all of a sudden, I have time now to rehearse again. It feels like things have turned a corner. They’re even due to begin building work on my old shop, (the landlord died over the summer and nobody owned the place, thereby everything came to a shuddering halt). Which is to say, I’m starting to feel like my old self again. The whimsy is returning.
So what did I get out of 2025? A lot of memories meeting people all over the south west, and a novel, and the benefit of the tutelage of Suzannah Dunn, (who really liked my novel), and a huge amount of time sat on trains. (Working in TIverton for three months meant five hours on trains and buses a day). And time to look at my fellow passengers, all watching TikTok.
The world will not change and I cannot make it. I just know that there are civil people out there, concerned for humans and humanity, opposed to stupid wars and political bullying, opposed to toxicity, big business, politics in general. Sometimes it is better to whisper than it is to shout, but I only say this because I’ve never felt entitled to shout, and that there are others who are much better at it than me.
Robert Garnham 