Always

Sometimes the most obvious things are right there, staring us in the face, and we don’t even stop and think about, let alone realise, what that thing is. This was my thing with ‘always’. If you do stop and think about it, something I’d failed to to do until very recently, you’ll see it’s just ‘all the way’. Maybe that ‘way’ is time or maybe it’s space or distance. In any case, it’s undeniably obvious – from start to finish.

So will you be with me always? Well, yeah, that’s a big commitment.. so how about all the way from October to June of the upcoming academic year? All that way if not always and forever.

‘Always’ is a pretty obvious word for a song title, which is probably why a great many songs with the word in the title are spectacularly awful. That’s not the case with this one though. So as a kind of musical interlude, before we get to the other point of this wee* post, here’s Travis!

Sometimes I think that all the best names for bands and artists have all been used up**. Then I remember Alvvays and how they split the w (double u) in two v’s, thereby creating one of the coolest band names ever, and all is well with the world again.

But wait a minute! Shouldn’t that be ‘double v’, as it is in Spanish? Of course it should. so who or what to blame*** forthis contribution to the beautiful mess that is the English language?

Who? The Romans.

What? The printing press.

So the ‘w’ came from Old English but the Roman alphabet couldn’t accomodate that so they used ‘uu’ for ‘w’. Then early printing presses couldn’t accomodate ‘vv’ because they didn’t have the blocks but they could do ‘uu’. Well, it’s something like that. The takeaway here is that there is actually a reason for these apparently unreasonable goings-on.

And returning to the band. They’d be really cool anyway if their name were ‘Always’ with a double u, but they are Alvvays with double v and are are undeniably super ultra mega cool.

If you’ve got this far, then thanks for reading.

If you want to go even further then:

*’wee’ is a wonderful Scottish word that means ‘small’.

** Remember how we use ‘up’ to give the idea of completion: drink up your beer, eat up your vegetables, shut the fuck up etc.

*** ‘to be to blame (for something) might look a bit weird to you (those two infinitives might freak you out a bit) but it’s a very common and useful way to talk about who or what is or was responsible for something happening. Who was responsible for the financial crisis? Not the banks. Not the bankers. Not the super-rich. No, no it was us who were to blame with our overspending and living beyond our means. Not really.

Thanks for reading.

This humble post is for Juan and Mariano (you know who you are) for their interest and encouragement.