The Trouble with Research

By Leonard Wibebrley

First Published February 12, 1981

10/6/2020

I have a silver pocket watch which once belonged to my friend Julian Brodestsky who was an excellent violinist and one of the world’s great optimists, for he spent many years trying to teach me to play the instrument. I lever learned to play the violin with any bravura because of the sensitivity of my ears. They could not abide all the scratches, squeaks, and whistles which must be endured before any kind of tone is achieved on this diabolical instrument. To be a great violinist, one has to have nerves of steel, which I have not.

So, though I have several striking photos of myself walking into Carnegie Hall carrying a violin, that is as close as I ever got to mastering the instrument. Julian is gone now; I still play a little occasionally, using earplugs. And I have Julian’s silver pocket watch.

It is far and away the best watch I ever possessed, though I believe it to be at least half a century old and in desperate need of cleaning. It is a delight to open the back and see the tiny wheels spinning about, happy as children at play. One whirls backward and forward with the grace of a ballet dancer, and there is a lavish display of small rubies in which the axles of these wheels are embedded.

The watch has a chronometer movement (five tiny beats to every second), and it embodies also a stopwatch. It keeps far better time than a much more modern watch which I bought but 20 years ago—one of those that runs on batteries. It has but one fault—it insists that my heart beats at the rate of 110 per minute when I am at rest which just cannot possibly be true.

So excellent a watch prompted me the other day to turn to the Britannica Encyclopedia to learn something about watches. It is always a mistake to open any reference book if you have not a couple of hours to spare, for you are certain to be waylaid which is exactly what happened to me.

Some not far from “watches” I came upon “wren”—that tiniest of birds of which everybody is very fond and of which only the Irish have a bad word to say. At the approach of Christmas, gangs of boys go about the Irish cities (or they used to in my youth) “ranning.” Tied on the end of a stick by a length of string, and dangling from it, they swing a dead wren, and importune a penny or so for it.

The custom originates in the story that when Mary and Joseph, with the infant Jesus, fled into Egypt, Herod’s soldiers asked the birds in which direction they had gone. Not a bid would utter a chirp except the wren, which told on them, and has been in disgrace in Ireland ever since.

Not a word of that story appears in the Britannica, but the encyclopedia did say that the headquarters of the wren are in tropical America, and wrens range all the way from Greenland to the Falkland Islands. There are all kinds of wrens—marsh wrens, cactus wrens, canyon wrens and in the eastern States, house wrens which eat the eggs of other birds. So it is not only in Ireland after all, that wrens have sullied their reputation.

The encyclopedia did say that due to its isolation, there is a subspecies of wren, distinct from all others, on the island of St. Kilda. So on my way to “watches” I stopped off at St. Kilda, which turns out to be the largest of a group of seven tiny islands in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland.

The islands are made of “grabbo,” which seems unlikely from the very name, though geologists have the most curious names for rocks, one of them being “greywackie”—a word surely more suitable to a small badger.

St. Kilda was inhabited by 36 sturdy Gaelic-speaking Scots until 1930. Then they got fed up with the place and asked to be evacuated to the mainland, and St. Kilda soon became the largest gannetry in the world. It provides also a home for puffins, fulmars, two kinds of mice, and the subspecies of wren I told you about.

On then to “watches,” but only to be accosted by water-boatmen, an aquatic insect which appears to row its way over ponds and small lakes on its legs. Mexicans eat their eggs—according to the Britannica.

I passed “whisky” and “whales” without a pause when I was held up by “Wayzgoose.” I defy anyone to pass Wayzgoose which is an annual outing of English printers and their employees; “wayz” deriving perhaps from “wase,” Middle English for sheaf and suggesting harvest goose.

Possibly, said the Britannica, the printers outing derives from the grand goose feast held at Waes, in Brabant, at Martinmas.

Martinmas? There was nothing to do but look it up. I never got to “watches.”

***** NEW ON KINDLE *****

A witty, affectionate, and delightfully informal look at Irish history, told from the point of view of Leonard Wibberley, who was raised both in Ireland and in England.

“Wibberley has an eye for the ‘chronic shortcomings’ and ‘talented imbecility’ of the Irish and a sympathy for their long oppression. He tells their story with color and vigorous concern.”—Kirkus Reviews

★★★★★ “A Grand Book Altogether. I stumbled across this book in my college library while researching for a thesis. Wibberley, who was educated in both Ireland and England, paints an amusing, brief picture of some of the history of Ireland and Ireland’s relationship with England. He mixes wit in with sometimes tragic history in what seems to me to be a very Irish fashion. It’s one of my favorite books, which has since been tracked down...”—Amazon Review

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