My better half sent me on a wild goose chase

My better half sent me on a wild goose chase^LB1. It was last Sunday 3^rd May. My job was to find the place where Loch Camelot do their patriotic singing lesson thing^LB2, you know. I had to be there early to get one of the booklets with all the words to the songs in it. Well, I walked round the Rynek twice but there was no sign of any bandstand^LB3. Of course, I hadn’t seen the posters so I didn’t know that this year the do was in Mały Rynek……

So, we sat in Viz a Viz, and nursing a glass of the amber fluid^LB4, I fell to remembering^LB5 the first time I saw Loch Camelot do their thing^LB6.We found it by accident. We sat outside the Noworolski café with gentle, nostalgic Polish emotion all around us. When they sang ‘Rozkwitały pąki białych róż’ I simply filled up^LB7. I’m a sucker for^LB8 that kind of thing. But, most of all, I remember there were a lot of foreign languages being spoken in the café – Italian, French, Spanish, German (plus my mother-in-law, representing England, and she can talk, believe me!). And you could see and hear that they blown away^LB9 by the whole thing, by something that Poles were doing in just the right way. Something that Poles do wonderfully well. They remember, in song, the sad but proud, moments in their history. The Irish are also good at this. Of course, both countries have a certain historical advantage (if that is the right word) in this matter.

For centuries they were shat^LB10 upon by experts. And now we can remind ourselves that they, who tried to keep us down for so long, didn’t win in the end. We are still here, and we have the sad, beautiful music to prove it.

LB¹ a wild goose chase – looking for something you can’t find, probably because it isn’t there

LB² do your thing – do what you do (e.g. singers sing). Also ‘do your own thing’ do it your way

LB³ bandstand – platform where music is played

LB⁴ amber fluid – rare Australian slang, which I like very much, meaning beer (‘bursztynowy płyn’ doesn’t sound quite right as a translation, though)

LB⁵ fall to doing something – a bit like ‘fall asleep’. You don’t  exactly control what your mind is doing. Also – fall to thinking about something

LB⁶ fill up – your eyes are wet, you’re going to cry

LB⁷ be a sucker for – be easily manipulated into e.g. liking something

LB⁸ be blown away by – by extremely impressed

LB⁹ I couldn’t think of a better way to say this than by using this very basic verb connected with excrement. This is actually a quotation from one of my favourite songs. The song describes what various people and animals do on someone’s gravestone in a cemetery, for example a young couple making love. Of course a cat might use the gravestone as a toilet. But the young soldier, who lies dead under the gravestone doesn’t at all mind what the cat does on his gravestone because the same thing was done to (or on) him by experts during his life