Off Your Rocker?

I've taken my usual oblique sidle up to this week's theme of  rocking chair , so what you're about to read is mostly disambiguation. I've very little to say about rocking chairs themselves (except that I did buy one for the nursery when my first daughter was born, so my wife could sit and rock while feeding the baby).

"Are you off your rocker?" is a well-known exclamation and there is a common belief that it's an implied metaphor, a falling out of one's rocking chair, aimed at someone who's done or said something a bit mad. However, it's much more likely to have another derivation closely allied to being "off your trolley", which is also frequently used to imply the same leaving of one's senses - and both phrases can be traced back to the bygone age of trolley buses.

a London trolley bus

Those vehicles, common in many British towns and cities from broadly the mid-1920s to the 1960s, ran on electricity which was supplied at 600 volts DC via a network of dual overhead cables that lined their routes (see above). The original use of the word trolley dated further back to the dual cable system first designed by an American, Leo Daft, at the end of the 19th century, in which he had a little four-wheeled device at the top end of the poles, "trolling" i.e. running along the cables behind the vehicle (possibly the first use of the word in its modern usage). Although configurations changed over the decades, the principle remained unchanged, with the result that the device that kept the top of the poles in contact with the cables was called a trolley, the poles were known as trolley poles and the vehicles themselves  trolley buses.

However, there was also another word used for this device that kept the poles in contact with the cables and that word was rocker (synonymous with trolley). If contact was broken, as sometimes happened, the vehicle, suddenly deprived of power, would soon come to a standstill. It was then said to be "off its rocker" or "off its trolley" - i.e. not functioning properly - and the conductor would have to re-connect the rocker/trolley device to the cables by means of a long wooden pole (like the ones used for opening and closing out of reach windows).

So that's it. "Off your rocker" has nothing really to do with rocking chairs.. except that during my diligent research for this blog I did come across what I thought was an intriguing upcycling project as well as a convenient visual pun on theme. Someone has been taking the seats out of scrapped trolley buses and actually converting them in to two-person rocking chairs (see below). 

a trolley bus seat upcycled as a rocking chair 

They are not the most attractive items, it must be said, and quite where they find a use, I'm not sure. One doesn't want to rock in a pub or cafe while trying to eat and drink. A waiting room maybe? Restful but tricky if you have to share with a stranger. Maybe the person who devised them was a bus enthusiast, or simply off his/her rocker.

If you thought all of that was stretching the theme this week, I'm not done yet. Here comes the latest poem from the imaginarium and it's all about Arthur Lee and me. Arthur was the charismatic leader of the American rock group Love, whose  third LP, the 1967 opus 'Forever Changes ' is still ranked as one of the finest of all time. (It's been inducted into both the Grammy Hall of Fame and the American National Recording Registry. If you've never heard it, do yourselves a favour.) 

After Love suffered what was effectively a heroin death in the 1970s, Arthur Lee forged on as a solo artist. However, despite being a cult figure, fabulous rock musician and lyricist (it helped to be born in Memphis, Tennessee), Lee's career took a bit of a downturn. In his own words: "I was gone for a decade. I went back to my old neighbourhood to take care of my father, who was dying of cancer. I was tired of signing autographs...tired of being bullshitted out of my money...I just got tired."

Lee re-emerged in the 1990s, finding that European fans remembered him more fondly than those of his homeland. He recorded new songs, he toyed with the idea of reforming Love, he played well-received gigs in Paris, London and Liverpool with pick-up bands. I came, I saw, I reviewed. Then in 1996 he was tried for "negligent discharge of a firearm" and because this was a third offence (the previous two being arson and assault), under California's 'three strikes' law, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. He protested his innocence of the charge, but many just thought he was off his rocker and the lyric of one of his songs was coming back to haunt him: "They're locking them up today, they're throwing away the key, I wonder who it will be tomorrow - you or me? "

Arthur Lee

While Arthur Lee was incarcerated, his fellow band members from Love died, meaning there would be no wished-for reunion of the original line-up. Then 5 years into his jail sentence the real culprit confessed to the gun crime, the state prosecutor was found guilty of misconduct, Lee was formally declared innocent of the firearms offence and was eventually released after serving half his term.

My Little Black Book*

there I am enjoying a chippy tea

with Arthur Lee and he 

lowers his shades and says

pass it to me so I slide it

reluctantly across the formica 

getting ketchup on the cover

and he hovers over lines 

I've written ideas for songs

about searching and being smitten

how LOVE is the holy grail

and TRUTH always wins

and he grins and says

I like your positivity keep going son

and I smile gratefully

as I take it back wipe it clean

and we finish our chips

and drink our tea though of course 

that's all before he wings back

across the sea and the gun thing

and they lock him up in jail

and throw away the key

* titled in an affectionate nod towards one of Arthur Lee's own songs, 'My Little Red Book '.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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The Rocking Chair

I was wandering along google paths looking for articles about rocking chairs when I came across the following. It is a five page document so I have edited it to fit the subject of rockers. It is by Hunter Dukes and the title is: The Art of Virtual Travel: A Sordid History of the Rocking Chair and was first published in Highbrow Magazine.

Before he gets to rocking chairs, however, he mentions this by William Cowper in 1785 about the act of reading:

"My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my main-sail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fire-side."

Now we come onto the rocking chairs:

‘While rocking chairs had been around America since the early 18th century, they did not fully enter the European consciousness until the 1830s, when travellers to the United States began commenting on their ubiquity. “In America,” wrote James Frewin for The Architectural Magazine and Journal in 1838, “it is considered a compliment to give the stranger the rocking-chair as a seat; and when there is more than one kind in the house, the stranger is always presented with the best.” Not everyone appreciated the gesture.

'That same year, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, the British social theorist Harriet Martineau stops off at a small inn between Stockbridge and Albany, New York. She describes “the disagreeable practice” of rocking in chairs and finds “ladies who are vibrating in different directions, and at various velocities, so as to try the head of a stranger almost as severely as the tobacco chewer his stomach.” A similar description later appeared in the Michigan Farmer and other magazines, echoing both the rocker’s nicotinic effects and asynchronicity; the author calls rocking chairs a woman’s “nervine, a narcotic, a stimulant,” and describes “a woman photographer [who] would sit in a rocker with a camera in her lap and placidly photograph a group of rocking women in rockers of various gaits”.

'Once Martineau gets going, she has trouble stopping. “How this lazy and ungraceful indulgence ever became general, I cannot imagine”, she laments, before painting America as the Land of the Rocker:

"When American ladies come to live in Europe, they sometimes send home for a rocking-chair. A common wedding present is a rocking-chair. A beloved pastor has every room in his house furnished with a rocking-chair by his grateful and devoted people. It is well that the gentlemen can be satisfied to sit still, or the world might be treated with the spectacle of the sublime American Senate in a new position; its fifty-two senators see-sawing in full deliberation, like the wise birds of a rookery in a breeze."

'Charles Dickens made a parallel observation in his American Notes, finding a rocking chair aboard a steamship on the Connecticut river: “But even in this chamber there was a rocking-chair. It would be impossible to get on anywhere, in America, without a rocking-chair.” The novelist seems to appreciate his seesawing surroundings, but it is tough to tell what exactly gets Martineau’s goat. The fact that the parlor women are vibrating?’

As I said at the beginning, the above is an edited version so I hope Mr Dukes forgives any of the cuts I have made.

For the poem I’d just like to nip back to another quote by Dukes from Diogenes Tubb:

"Get a packet of Tidman’s sea salt and put it in a pail of hot water beside you, then recline on a rocking-chair after having devoured hastily a cheese sandwich. Rock yourself violently and inhale the salt steam. It’s every bit as good as a steamboat journey, and a great deal cheaper." 

He follows it by this poem published in The Youth’s Companion (1909):

When I do not wish to stay
At my home I go away;
And my trusty rocking chair
Knows the road to everywhere.
Up and down the parlour floor.
Travelling twenty times or more...
Then I make believe that we
Are two thousand miles at sea.

Thanks for reading, Terry

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Rocking Chair

Call me a softy if you like, ‘The Woman in Black’ is the scariest film I’ve ever tried to watch. I’ve had a few attempts. One was at the cinema with my daughter. I think she begged me to take her, only to discover how fearful it is.

 “Tell me when it’s gone,” she whispered.

“I can’t, I’m not looking.” I had no idea what ‘it’ was.

There’s a particularly creepy scene concerning a room full of clockwork monkeys playing musical instruments and an empty rocking chair, rocking. Too spooky and reminds me of something chilling my son said when he was little.

I have my grandfather’s rocking chair, I’ve probably mentioned it before because it is special item and means a lot to me. I remember him with fondness, gently rocking as he read the paper or his book, often sharing an orange with me when I was a child. After he died, the chair was untouched in the house he’d shared with my aunt since he was widowed. My sister had children before me and I think our aunt gave her the rocking chair to nurse her first baby. When I bought my house, the chair came to me and for a while, it was the only furniture I had to sit on. It moved with me when I got married and had a special place in the back room. I don’t know if our son, a young child at the time, was teasing when he told me that he’d seen the rocking chair rocking on its own. The thought of it gave me shivers. I felt sure I would be aware if there was anything odd. Over the years, the chair began to look tatty. Covering it with a throw and a cushion wasn’t enough. I had it repaired and recovered, and moved it into my bedroom.

As for ‘The Woman in Black’, I’m told by a friend that the stage play is more scary than the film. I can’t imagine that, but I’ll accept the opinion without the need to see for myself.

Robert Service had the right idea,

My Rocking-chair

When I am old and worse for wear
I want to buy a rocking-chair,
And set it on a porch where shine
The stars of morning-glory vine;
With just beyond, a gleam of grass,
A shady street where people pass;
And some who come with time to spare,
To yarn beside my rocking-chair.
Then I will light my corn-cob pipe
And dose and dream and rarely gripe.
My morning paper on my knee
I won't allow to worry me.
For if I know the latest news
Is bad,-to read it I'll refuse,
Since I have always tried to see
The side of life that clicks with glee.

And looking back with days nigh done,
I feel I've had a heap of fun.
Of course I guess that more or less
It's you yourself make happiness
And if your needs are small and few,
Like me you may be happy too:
And end up with a hope, a prayer,
A chuckle in a rocking-chair.

Robert Service

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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