the sick note

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 08:01 PM

Now, can anybody find that Readers Digest article? Pat Cooksey's message says it was published in 1937, and was performed in music halls in the 1920s.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 07:51 PM

As *I* posted in one of those many threads, this story was once listed in Readers Digest as actually happening to an apple picker in Nova Scotia.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 07:28 PM

I did my best to find all our threads on this song, and I came up with thirty - all now listed in the crosslinks above. I think the earliest was Thread Number 32, begun October 15, 1996, two weeks after the inception of Mudcat. If you see any others, please let me know about them.

This song has an incredible number of titles. Songwriter Pat Cooksey, a sometime Mudcatter, titled it "The Sick Note." It's also commonly called "Why Paddy's Not at Work Today," and "Bricklayer's Lament." See above for a host of other names.

Cooksey got the idea from a 1958 monologue by German musician and humorist Gerard Hoffnung. I suppose the best explanation is in this message from Pat Cooksey dated 11 May 2002.

Sooner or later, I may try to combine those thirty threads down to a more reasonable number, but it's kinda interesting to have them all intact for now.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: maeve
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 12:55 PM

That's funny about the bricklayer story showing up on the tv show, Kendall.

If you do want to find something like that another time, I have excellent results just putting the term into the filter search, setting the length of time accordingly. It is much more inclusive than the DT search.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Thomas Stern
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 12:46 PM

http://monologues.co.uk/004/Bricklayers_Story.htm

best wishes, Thomas.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: GUEST
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 10:40 AM

Where it was wasn't the point anyway.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: GUEST,kendall
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 10:07 AM

I entered the sick note in the dt. nothing. I tried Paddys not at work, nothing. I don't use that section often enough to get familiar with it.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Dave MacKenzie
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 09:56 AM

It was in a thread entitled "The Bricklayer's Lament (The Sick Note)" less than a month ago, occasioned by the BBC broadcasting a wireless program to celebrate Hoffnung's address to the Oxford Union.

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Leadfingers
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 09:28 AM

Gerard Hoffnung - Speech to The Oxford Union , based on a Magazine Article , turned into a song by Pat Cooksey , and put in The Top Fifty by Noel Murphy .

Subject: RE: the sick note
From: Scabby Douglas
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 09:12 AM

Putting "sick note" into the Search field on the Home page brought up about 6 pages of links.

From memory, I suspect that most of them are the same old discussion about who wrote it (Pat Cooksey/Noel Murphy /Gerard Hoffnung ). The words are definitely in amongst it all, too.

Subject: the sick note
From: kendall
Date: 28 Aug 12 - 08:45 AM

I'm almost certain that this subject is in the dt somewhere if I had the time to find it.

That old joke about Paddy and the barrel of bricks just appeared on the TV show, Urban Legends. Talk about recycling.