Origins: the sick note/ murphy and the bricks

Subject: RE: Origins: the sick note/ murphy and the bricks
From: Gurney
Date: 25 Oct 04 - 05:57 AM

I'm happy to report that Radio NZ play Hoffnung's recitation a couple of times a year still.
Pat Cooksey and I were flatmates when he wrote his song, and I still remember it hitting the Coventry scene. Pat always has given Hoffnung as his primary, but not only, source of inspiration, but the recitation and the song are very different, and both great.

Subject: RE: Origins: the sick note/ murphy and the bricks
From: GUEST,Eamon Reid.
Date: 25 Oct 04 - 08:42 PM

I heard this song from the horses mouth at they say, last night
in Franfurt. Pat was brilliant and has many other great songs in
his progamme.

Subject: RE: Origins: the sick note/ murphy and the bricks
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 22 Sep 11 - 08:34 AM

From Saturday Review, Volume 32, 1949, page 6:

PIETRO Dl DONATO. author of "Christ in Concrete" and an expert bricklayer by trade, treasures an old clipping from Tide that is highly amusing if not entirely believable. It concerns an over-zealous foreman who spotted a pile of bricks on the third floor of an uncompleted building. The bricks didn't belong there, and, the day shift having gone home, he decided to remove them himself. In the shaft there was a barrel slung to a pulley. The foreman hoisted this barrel to the third floor, tied the rope to the ground, and climbed upstairs to pile the bricks into the barrel. This job completed, he descended and untied the rope. His intention was to lower the barrel gently to the ground, but his plan was frustrated by the following rapid-fire sequence of events: 1. The loaded barrel, which weighed a great deal more than the foreman, plunged down the shaft, while the flabbergasted foreman froze to the rope and shot up like a rocket. 2. When the barrel hit the ground the bottom fell out. This made the foreman heavier than the barrel and he crashed down on the bricks while the barrel flew up. 3. Understandably dazed, the foreman let go of the rope, so the barrel came down again — right on the foreman's noggin. "Knocked him out cold," concludes Di Donato happily. — Bennett Cerf.