In Praise of RAS Syndrome
All these years of listening to Michael Oldfield, I can’t believe I never noticed this until this week:
“4 a.m. in the morning
Carried away by a moonlight shadow…”
Well, duh.
This reminds me of the old Dad’s Army sketches where Lance Corporal Jones would demonstrate an even lesser understanding of the twenty-four clock than that possessed by his superior officer, Captain George Mainwaring. Whereas Mainwaring displayed a vague comprehension of the concept, but a limited knowledge of whether seven o’clock at night translated into twenty-one hundred, seventeen hundred or nineteen hundred, Jones frequently upstaged him by appearing entirely clueless. He was frequently mixing up his words and all too often he’d complete a sentence with something along the lines of “I shall return here at six o’clock….hours”.
What I’d like to know is exactly what our song’s romantic hero was doing at 4 a.m. in the morning. Using his PIN number to get cash from an ATM machine? Watching the CNN Network? Recording a DAT tape? Contracting the HIV virus?
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