Adventures in our native tongue

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As far as languages go, English is one nasty piece of work. They — those know-it-all they — say it’s the most difficult language to learn, and while I don’t often bow to the “they authorities,” in this case, I am 100% with them.

A few days ago, my son-in-law, my 2½-year-old grandson and I were looking out the living room window at a neighbor hauling his lawnmower across his driveway. Every moment is a teaching moment for 2½-year-olds, so son-in-law says, “Alan is going to mow the lawn” just as I was about to say, “Alan is going to cut the grass.”

What can you say about a language that has two completely different sets of words to describe the exact same thing yet still can’t come up with a word to solve the she/he–she or he problem. It can’t be that hard. Some would say there already is a word: they. But no. “They” is plural. How can you use the same word for singular? It doesn’t make sense.

Not so fast, bucko. We’re talking English here. Precedent. We’ve got “read” and “read” — same word, means the same thing, except one is present tense and the other is past tense, and good luck figuring out which it is on your first try. So if they can do it with read/read, then they can do it with they/they. It would be a heck of a lot simpler than she/he, he or she, or (s)he. Just saying.

While we’re at it, speaking of simpler, wouldn’t life be a lot easier if the word “its” always took an apostrophe? But no, some would say. It’s is a contraction of it is. Its is a possessive pronoun, and like all possessive pronouns, it doesn’t take an apostrophe. Never mind that every other possessive takes an apostrophe: dog’s bone, camel’s bone, it’s bone. If nothing else, then you’d never have to worry ever again about whether its takes an apostrophe. I just want English to be easier, one word at a time.

It’s an uphill battle. Sometimes you have to wonder who makes up the rules and bizarre spellings we have to contend with. They’ll tell you it’s because of word origins from the Latin or Greek or French or one of those other less nasty languages. I say, with all due respect, just because those languages have weird spellings, does that mean we have to copy their bad habits?

In my high school French class, we had oral tests, when the teacher read out a paragraph in French, and we would copy down what she said, word for word. Spelling counted. I picture a foreigner taking an English oral test …

Mie muther bot a cote at the stor yesturdaye. It is blak with a yello belt. Mie dawg eets the belt sum times. It likes to playe owt side and go for woks. I hav menee noo frens in this cuntree. I here Amarika is a veree big cuntree. I hope too see awl of it wun daye.

Next week, the English teacher will explain why it’s caught and taught but thought and bought and don’t forget bough and though. Hey, don’t give up, class. We’re just getting started.

For our listening pleasure this morning, The Band …

Cry, cry, baby

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Have you looked at the calendar? Have you seen what day it is tomorrow? Tax Day — that annual rite of spring.

I hope you’ve filed already and have that nasty piece of business behind you for another year. Unless, of course, you like filing taxes, and then I don’t know what to say. Um, have a happy day?

There are two parts to filing taxes I don’t like — the paying of the taxes and the filing of those taxes. I don’t see a path forward where I would ever like to pay taxes, but the good news is I have done a 180 on the filing part. The trick is, if you don’t make too much money, the IRS will fill out the form for you for free. Like, who wouldn’t trust the IRS? Pity the fool, but in this case, I do.

It’s so easy. I pop in a few numbers, often zeros — in general, book writers don’t make a lot of money — and they do all the rest. I love it. I love Tax Day. Except for the part where I always owe the government money, which does leave a bad taste in my mouth. It just galls me to pay taxes of any description. I know it doesn’t do any good to complain, and most of the time I wouldn’t, but Tax Day — that’s my annual rite of spring: to complain.

I blame that on my youth. Or more precisely, the first time I filled out a 1040. Except they aren’t called 1040s in Canada. But it was the same deal. In the days before “online” became one word, we filled out the form by hand — the original in pen and mailed off and a copy, done in pencil and stuck in the filing cabinet.

I was 16 my first time. My dad and I had a date at the kitchen table one April night. He was going to show me how to fill out the income tax form that first year I earned a paycheck. It was meant to be a learning experience, but, sadly, I’m the type of person who needs to do something over and over and over again for that something to sink in. Once a year was never going to cut it.

My father didn’t know that at the time, or if he did, he chose to ignore it and soldiered on, explaining that this number goes on that line, add this, subtract that, flip over the page, more adding, more subtracting, and finally, come to near the end of the page and a final subtraction, and Dad points to a blank line and says, “You owe $189 in taxes,” and then fills in the blank.

“What!?” I said. Actually, it was more like “What!!!!??” “What do you mean I owe the government money? Are they going to do this to me every year?” I’m sure my dad did his level best to explain why we pay taxes to the government, but I was having none of it. Not then, not now. It’s my money (or at least I thought it was), and it should be me who decides how to spend it. Not to mention what a lousy job they’ve done with it. Anyone who can add and subtract could do better.

Spring has sprung, the flowers are in bloom, taxes are done for another year, and now I have nothing left to complain about. Until next year rolls around.

A little Janis Joplin crying, but not over taxes …

Movie madness

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It was 1962 – I was 8 years old, and my older brother, all of 10, took me to see my first movie on the big screen, not in a movie theater, mind you, but at a matinee showing in our church’s basement of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Imagine, Cecil B. DeMille taking hold of an 8-year-old’s life for 2-1/2 hours. I would never be the same. I don’t think I had any sort of handle on what a movie was back in 1962, which is to say I didn’t realize movies were fiction. To me, “The Greatest Show on Earth” was real, like my life was real, only their life up on the screen was bigger, bolder and better than mine. I decided then and there I wanted to be in that life.

I also hadn’t cottoned on to the idea that movies employed actors and actresses. But that all changed in a hurry when I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” when I was 13 and developed my first movie star crush on Leonard Whiting. I wrote him a fan letter, to which I never received a reply, and that was the end of that, and so I moved on, as I suspect he did, although he probably wasn’t aware there was anything to move on from. My takeaway from that heart-wrenching denial of our relationship: If I was a movie star, I’d answer my mail.

You know me. Give me a challenge, and I’m going to say, “I can do that!” So at the tender age of 13 I decided what I most wanted to be was an actor. Well, that career dream didn’t last long. Two years later, I was in a school production of “She Stoops To Conquer” and my teacher told me I’d make a good actor. While I basked in the affirmation, for the first time I actually stopped to think about it for a minute. Which is all it took me to realize: all those lines to memorize. That sounded like a lot of work that couldn’t sound more boring if Perry Como sang the tune. I lay down my thespian dreams and picked up the guitar. Kumbaya.

However, this newfound respect for actors only intensified my love of movies. I grew up on the West Island of Montreal, with its one movie theater nine miles away. That meant growing up, going to the movies was a big deal, like getting Ruby Foo’s Chinese takeout — it never happened. And if it did, it was an event of vast proportion. But when I moved away from home to an apartment in downtown Montreal, I knew I had died and gone to movie heaven. I could see any movie anytime I wanted. Those were the years of “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Return of the Pink Panther, “Silver Streak,” “All the President’s Men” and dozens more. Talk about gluttony. I had my fill.

For years I would watch the Academy Awards, having seen every movie up for an award, and it was fun to guess the winners. Then came married life, and kids, and a night out at the movies was beyond the budget. Thankfully, the world invented DVDs and Block Buster and Netflix and saved us parents from a movie desert. And nowadays with Netflix streaming, I could watch a movie every night, if I only had the stamina.

I get it that movies reflect the society that creates them, but a lot of the movies produced since Covid are reflections I’m not willing to spend my time and weekly allowance on. The ultimate movie curmudgeon. Two examples from a lengthier lists of things that bug me in movies nowadays: 1) Why is there always a parking spot in front of the New York office building when our hero shows up in his BMW? Every single time. That defies reality — beyond a leap of faith. 2) Why do directors have actors who don’t smoke play characters who do? I’m not against smoking in movies, but if a character smokes, then they should really smoke. Not light the cigarette, take a puff, hold that puff for a few seconds, then blow it out, then get called away, and they butt out the cigarette. No real smoker would ever do that. They’d smoke it down to the filter, cough and then go on their way. Now that’s Oscar material. OK, one more. 3) Actors who are constantly moving their head from side to side when they talk. This is meant to indicate something, I’m sure, but all it looks like to me is wobble dolls.

Languid is the order of the day today – Derek and the Dominoes …

Plotters and pantsers

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In the book writing world, in the part where the “pros” tell us “plebes” how to go about writing a book, the terms “plotters” and “pantsers” frequently make an appearance. Plotters are those who write an outline first and adhere to it — these are the writers who know their ending before they write word one of their novel. Pantsers, from the Latin pants, meaning “pants” and ter, meaning “seat of the.” They are way more fun; everything is spur of the moment. They have no idea where the story is going, i.e., I will let the words on the page direct me where I go next.

I am a plotter, in the flesh. No one plots like I do. Not just when writing books. My whole life is a plot, a giant to-do list. Everything is planned out. I don’t know how to spell spontinaity, and if I did, it sure wouldn’t be my middle name.

Plotters can write in any genre they want, but historical fiction is a natural for them. That, of course, is if as the writer, you want to be factual. If the War of the Roses breaks out on Thursday night, you can’t instead be having your hero cajoled into a night down at the pub with the boys at that point. You can’t be moving Thursday night’s war to next Tuesday just because your character wanted to tie one on and you are letting him direct you where you go next in the story. History doesn’t work that way. Unless of course it’s revisionist history. But that’s an entirely different genre.

I — a natural-born plotter — always have a good idea of what a post on my blog is going to be about before I sit down to write it. I’ve plotted it out, which is beyond easy for a blog: come up with a topic and a couple of points, and I’m away to the races. I don’t spend an inordinate amount of time doing this, but the time I do spend is not nothing. If I sit down in front of a blank screen and expect to be enlightened, it’s not going to happen. It never has, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it never will.

So, today, without a topic in mind, I went on a walk, first to clear my head and then to fill it with an idea, any idea. I stepped outside for the first time in 24 hours — a whole day spent inside away from the pollen. So there I was, bright-eyed and bushy tailed (what does that even mean?), ready to set off on my walk, ready to admire the spring gardens along the way — the forsythia and cherry blossoms in full bloom, the hyacinths and white and yellow daffodils, and those little blue things: a panoply of color. I sneeze, and out comes a tissue, blow my nose, sneeze again, a cough, another sneeze, and out comes the soggy tissue once more. Now all I see through my rheumy eyes is pollen-producing evil incarnate. Out went the idea of a “Colors of spring” post, replaced with “Evil plants and their offspring.”

But no, that wouldn’t work. Far too whiny. And by this time my head was so clogged up, I couldn’t think of anything else. So that’s where I was when I sat down just minutes ago, with no idea what to write about this week.

And just like that, a pantser was born.

For our listening pleasure today, Creedence Clearwater Revival …

I can do that!

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Probably it was the mid-’90s when I saw the Hawaiian ukulele player Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwo’Ole at the Lowell Folk Festival. His performance was one of the most memorable live music experiences I have ever experienced. He was electrifying, especially when he sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” that segued into “What a Wonderful World” and back again. I couldn’t have been more stunned at the beauty of it.

So much so that I said right then and there, “I can do that!” Now, you’re probably thinking, based on how great this guy must have been, that no, I can’t. I wouldn’t want to dissuade you of that notion, not entirely, but wait. Because, you see, after all these years, I’ve recently picked up the ukulele again. And by all those years, I mean more than 60.

The ukulele was my first instrument (not counting the triangle in kindergarten), which my Uncle George gave me when I was around 6 or 7 years old. It came with a book of songs that included “Skip to My Lou” and “Turkey in the Straw.” I don’t remember any of the other tunes, but, honestly, I’m impressed that I can remember those two after all this time.

I took to playing the ukulele like I was born to it, totally gung-ho. Right up until one of the strings popped. It’s just not the same with three strings. At 6 years old, I wasn’t in the financial position to buy a new string, and I hate to say it, but my parents were probably glad that with no ukulele, the caterwauling was over. And thus came the end of my ukulele career.

But wait a second. A week or two after I finished writing my book last fall, there appeared in my town’s weekly newspaper an announcement for a ukulele group that met twice a month at a local theater. Beginners welcome.

Now, I just happen to have a ukulele, which I acquired in a roundabout way. What happened is, several years ago, we went on a family vacation to Maui, and on our last day there, we walked into a music store and my future son-in-law picked up a ukulele and started riffing. Cut to the future: With my elephant-like memory, when future son-in-law became actual son-in-law, I gave him what I thought was a brilliant present: his own ukulele. It turns out I was terribly misguided, and to make that story a little shorter, I am now in possession of said ukulele.

So, twice a month I now go to a ukulele session. The average age of attendants is well older than my late first ukulele (RIP), and we all have a great time. With a few sessions under my belt, I’m way past “Skip to My Lou.” I’m talking “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Octopus’s Garden.” This is the big time.

I’m starting to think my “I can do that!” when I heard IZ play all those years ago is maybe not too far off. You remember, don’t you, what happened the last time I said “I can do that”? Right, I wrote a book. One song is nothin’.

Here he is, my inspiration, Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole …

If it’s drowning you’re after, don’t torment yourself with shallow water

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Top of the mornin’ to ya. Ain’t life grand.

You can always trust the Irish to put a positive spin on everything, including mornings. Just suppose that last night, one of those monster flooding type of storms came through and wiped out your back 90, and supposing in the morning after surveying the damage, you put on your billy boots and start out on your five-mile walk to the village to suss out the bigger picture of the storm’s damage. You’ve not gone far on the road when you see your neighbor up ahead, and when you’re within shouting distance of each other, you call out, “Top of the mornin’ to ya.” Of course you do.

So let’s celebrate. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! The patron saint of green beer and drunken parades. You might not have known that. But the one thing you do know, I’m sure, is Patrick is the one who banished the snakes from Ireland.

Not so fast, leprechaun breath. That snake story is a man-made myth created by the Roman Christians, the would be invaders and conquerors of Ireland. The reality is that there never were any snakes in Ireland. What there was instead was the pagan religion with its Druid shamans. Druid art includes many depictions of the serpent, often coiled around a staff, an important symbol for the pagans.

What Patrick was sent to Ireland to do was not to banish the snakes, but to banish the serpents – the Druids. Which is what the Christians did. Out with the old and in with the new. It was in the fifth century when Patrick came to Ireland and Christianity took over, which, coincidentally, is when another Irish saint was said to be born, St. Brigit.

Pre-Christianity, the pagans in Ireland worshipped the supreme goddess Brigit. She meant everything to them; she was their morning, noon and night, and so the Christian leaders realized that the best way to convert the pagans to Christianity was to adopt and adapt some of the pagan rituals as their own and thus become easier to swallow. Thus the old goddess Brigit became the new saint, Brigit.

Celtic mythology is rich in legend. What’s most fascinating about myths for me is distinguishing the facts from the fantasy. I always thought the snake story was a fact, and here it turns out to be a euphemism, a mythical fantasy. I have to thank my friend Joyce for putting me on this fact-finding journey just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

Éirinn go Brách!

To celebrate the day, Van Morrison’s lilting Irish lullaby …

Remember what?

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Nestled among the foothills of Tipperary in Ireland lies a village called Ballingarry. Pretty much off the beaten track, its one claim to fame, at least historically, is this is where in 1848, a group of Young Ireland confederates met up with a police detachment and a bit of a battle ensued. The fighting took place in a farmhouse north of Ballingarry, closer to the village The Commons, but the history books call it Ballingarry, so at this point it’s a bit late to be switching out names.

Every year on the final Saturday of July, people gather at The Commons and walk over to the scene of the battle, a house that is now a wonderful museum that honors Young Ireland and commemorates The Famine. In 2016, I spent the summer in Ireland doing research for my book, and this reenactment/walk was a must on my to-do list (you can read all about that summer and my trip to Ballingarry here). Let me put a white flag here. (When I plant a white flag, I am saying I want to continue this conversation but right now I have this other important thing I want to say, and I’ll come back to the flag when I’m done with this other very important thing.)

In the years prior to my summer sojourn in Ireland, I’d spent a fair amount of time thinking about the book, story lines, characters, plot, fleshing out detail – not actually doing any writing per se, just thinking.

The good thing about thinking is you can think whatever you want, the crazier the better. For example, back then this writing project was going to be a trilogy, the first book was set in Ireland, the second in New Orleans and the third in Montana. I had stories mapped out for all three and was beyond excited to get started. The old champing at the bit. First things first: Every project has to have a name, and this one was no different. I named the trilogy “Avalon,” and scoring no points for originality, I named the three books “The Irish Book,” “The New Orleans Book” and “The Montana Book.” Working titles is what they call them. They are very much temporary, like placeholders.

Let’s go back to the white flag and the walk from The Commons to the farmhouse, which culminated that day in a gathering in the front courtyard. At one point I looked up at the house and above the front door, to a plaque that read “Remember ’48.” It was like a bolt of lightning. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was it. The real title for The Irish Book. I was thrilled. It was a perfect title. True, I did know it was a working title, only because my experience with editors has taught me that I could call it whatever I wanted, but the editor is always going to call it something else. Never once has an editor accepted the title of any piece I’ve submitted for publication. And even though I knew that, I was in complete denial. Surely, I said to myself, any editor would recognize perfection when she saw it.

It turns out she did. Only she, or maybe she was a he, wasn’t my editor.

Here’s what happened. A few days ago, I thought it would be a nice idea to get in touch with the Warhouse museum. I did a search online for the Ballingarry Famine Warhouse, and you know how those searches go: You start out looking up the prices of apples in Washington and before you know it you’re reading about sheep exports to Brazil. Web wormholes. Only three degrees of separation from the Warhouse I got sent to a publication page of a book by William Nolan. Guess what it’s called?

“Remember ’48: Young Ireland and the Rising”

Of course it is. … to be continued.

This morning we’ve got the sweet voice of Linda Ronstadt …

Remember Forty-Eight

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Shortly after I hit Send on my effervescently happy post last week, like maybe five minutes later, I realized that while, yes, I am an inherently happy person, the reason for my particular buoyancy last week was I’d just hours earlier finished editing (at least for this go-round) a chapter in the book that was in need of extensive surgical repair. That accomplishment made me feel like a doctor coming out of surgery who says, “Good job in there” with a very undoctory happy dance thrown in. I am two chapters further along in this surgical repair business, and I know that when I get this chapter edited, my happy quotient is set to go through the roof.

Before I get us too deep in the weeds on the travails of editing a novel, let me tell you about my novel. First things first, right?

I’ve set the story in 1848 Ireland, the unrelenting year of death, disease and starvation in the midst of the Great Potato Famine. Historians call 1848 the Year of Revolutions in Europe, a general revolt of the lower classes against the aristocracy. Italy had its Young Italy and Garibaldi, and Ireland had its Young Ireland, a group of radical thinkers who fought for Ireland’s freedom and independence from British rule.

Brigit, a servant girl in western Ireland, despairs of the horror that has befallen the people during the famine, and in looking for a way to help them, she discovers Young Ireland and their dream of independence and a way of feeding the population. In the feudalistic system in place at the time, Irish landlords shipped all their crops to England to pay their taxes. Young Ireland proposed self-government and keeping the country’s food at home.

Brigit receives a vision of a young man, lying bloodied in battle, and it comes as no surprise to anyone (except Brigit) that her vision is of Emmet, a newspaperman in Dublin who works for the most radical of Young Ireland’s leaders. She, in the desolate countryside of western Ireland, and he, on the other side of the country in the political hotbed of Dublin, are two sides of the same journey fighting for the freedom of their country, first separately and then together.

It’s not all blood and guts, but there is plenty of subterfuge and adventure, good guys and bad guys, truth and lies. Young Ireland has a story to tell about their country that year, and I’ve snuck in at this late date to do it for them.

You might not have heard this one before, a throwback to the 50s and 60s, Sonny Cleveland …

Happy as a lark, or is that a pig in mud?

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I’m what you might call a happy-go-lucky sort.

Hold it. That sounds like I’m frolicking in the fields where the deer and the antelope play. Let’s tone that down a bit. How about just plain old happy. And I am happy. But I didn’t used to be; I suspect being unhappy with one’s lot in life is not atypical – I see it all the time, and it’s a shame.

So tell me, Miss Happy Pants, how did you go from unhappy to happy?

Two pivotal events – one of them a movie scene and the other a picture in my mind. The first of those I will describe in some detail on the off chance one of you is a Pauline Kael wannabe and knows what movie I’m talking about. Because I have no clue. Here goes: the scene. Two boys are standing under a leafy tree in front of their high school. One boy is our hero, and he plays the nice, boy-next-door type. Like a John Cusack, think 1990s. The other boy, the hero’s sidekick and best friend, is a nerdy, somewhat overweight, non-chick magnet. Think a young Jonah Hill. These two boys are talking when out the front door comes the school Queen Bee with her entourage. As she walks past the sidekick, she knocks his arm and his books go flying. She walks on, giggling with her girlfriends. The hero says something I can’t remember but I’m pretty sure was something demeaning about the Queen Bee, prompting the sidekick to say, and I paraphrase, “You watch. Before she gets to the bus, she’s going to turn around and walk back here and apologize, then she’s going to invite me to the prom.” To which the hero says, and I paraphrase, “Good luck with that! Not in a million years.” To which the sidekick says, “It’s my life, my movie; why would I make it sad and depressing?” Of course, the girl never looks back and there is no prom invitation, and most people would say he’s living in a fantasy world.

I, on the other hand, said, “Exactly! This is my life. I’m the writer, star, director and producer of this movie, so let’s make it a happy one.

Again, the whole point of me capturing that magical moment in film history is I am always searching for the name of the movie, if for no other reason than it’s good to cite your sources. But also, the idea of my life as my movie caught me at a moment when I was listening, and it got me thinking, mostly that a course correction of such magnitude was easier said than done. This was going to take a plan. (Me and my plans.)

Simple life, simple plan: Picture this: A big plate, piled high with your life. A scoop for family, a scoop for job, for money, for friends – everything, the good, the bad, the ugly. Rule #1 (me and my rules): Identify one of the scoops on your plate that’s making you unhappy. Either fix it or get rid of it. Rinse and repeat. Rule #2. Don’t add any new bad things to your plate. Follow those two rules and eventually, every scoop on your plate will be a happy one. It took a lot of years to get my plate where it’s filled only with happy bits, but it was worth it – life is good.

And no, there will be no actual movie of my life to view on demand. I’d be so afraid the musical director might choose Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy” as the soundtrack. Voluntarily adding that song to my life, well … see Rule #2 above.

Instead, this morning, in harmony, the Everly Brothers …

Well read

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Ask any historical fiction author, and 99.5% will tell you that doing the research is the best part of writing a book. The other point-5 percent? They likely didn’t understand the question.

The vast majority of that research involves reading. I bet if you surveyed all writers, 99.5% of them, when asked to list their favorite hobbies on their resume, would put reading first. And the other point-5? Well, you know.

You can count me in that number. The 99.5 one. Reading is my passion, and I’ve always had it bad. Back in ye olde college days, I was once asked, “If money was no object and you could do anything you wanted as a job, what would you do? Too easy. Without giving it a second thought, I said, “Lying on a beach reading.” Think big, right?

I can see now that I had nothing in there about writing a book, just reading them. And read them I did. I’ve got bookshelves filled with nothing but Irish books, each of them with a piece of notepaper sticking out the top doing double duty as bookmark and cryptic research notes like “p.46 Clarendon institutes curfew; p.122 typhus outbreak; p.87-94 potato rot; p.12 total deaths in 1848.” Cheery stuff, but it’s my own fault for setting my book in Ireland during the Great Famine.

Besides books, there are newspapers. Lucky for me, the subject of my novel, the revolutionary group Young Ireland, published their own weekly national newspapers – 1848’s version of the alternative media – and those papers handed me a treasure trove of goodies. Thank heavens for newspapers. I’m not sure I would have had a book if not for the newspapers.

Nowadays, we peg a newspaper’s editorial stance and journalistic bent as leftwing or rightwing, liberal or conservative. The Young Ireland newspapers were a different beast; they can’t be slotted into left or right. The Young Irelanders were rebels, anti-British rule, pro Ireland’s independence, so if anything, they were libertarians. A breath of fresh air compared with the contemporary establishment papers, those read by the gentry, the Anglos and Anglo Irish Protestants. Those papers skewed heavily conservative; not just the editorials but the articles, the facts manipulated to serve the establishment. We love to complain today about the untrustworthiness of the biased mainstream media. But that’s so old news, a yawn. Biased media has been the norm since 1848 at least, and my guess is it dates to the first newspaper to come off a press.

I just might have to research that one day.

Look what I dug up for today – the Zombies in a video straight out of the 60s …