Welcome to Letters from Quotidia 2026, Weekend Supplement 14. Yesterday saw the completion of the rollout of the Letters from Quotidia interspersed with 13 Weekend Supplements which were additional original posts because I had something else to say and sing about. This 14th Supplement will continue the pattern of a cover and a new composition.

During my first year in college in third term, 1969, I bought Leonard Cohen’s Songs from a Room. I was already a fan having played through the songs on his first LP, Songs of Leonard Cohen, with muso friends over the previous two terms. We rated him as phenomenal, and I remained a fan- through to his final album release, You Want It Darker in 2016 and his posthumous, Thanks for the Dance in 2019.

Songs from a Room features the enduring classic Bird on a Wire but the song I’ll cover here is the third song of the album, A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes. Here are the words that strike a chord in me 57 years later. The heroes are, lonesome and quarrelsome, tick! Each man beneath his ordinary load, tick! I guess these heroes must always live there where you and I have only been, tick! And isn’t this the definition of Quotidia, a place where ordinary people live ordinary lives but who every now and then, encounter the extraordinary?

In the song, a young man among them repeats four times, I’d like to tell my story. A refrain I have uttered over the decades. And the kicker for me, I sing this for the crickets…and for all who do not need me!  Shall we listen to three poetic references to crickets? In his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, W. B. Yeats speaks of how peace comes, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.

Emily Dickinson tells us, the earth has many keys,/ Where melody is not/ Is the unknown peninsula./ Beauty is nature’s fact.//But witness for her land,/ And witness for her sea / The cricket is her utmost/ Of elegy to me.//

Anne Sexton in her poem, The Twelve Dancing Princesses, asks, If you danced from midnight/ to 6 A.M. who would understand? And she answers in several stanzas, the runaway boy…the paralytic’s wife…the passengers from Boston to Paris…the amnesiac…the drunken poet…the insomniac listening to his heart…and finally… The night nurse/with her eyes slit like Venetian blinds,/she of the tubes and the plasma,/listening to the heart monitor,/the death cricket bleeping…// So, let’s listen to a tale about a bunch of lonesome and quarrelsome heroes. [insert song]

I’ll continue the theme of heroes in the second part of this post. The resourceful and wily Odysseus of Greek myth becomes the drab everyman hero Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s modern masterpiece, Ulysses, as he wanders around Dublin over the course of one day. Cú Chulainn, hero of Irish myth, faces a dilemma that will lead to his death: he is invited by three one-eyed hags to a feast of roast dog.

Now, one of his taboos is eating dog meat but another is refusing hospitality, so he takes one bite to fulfil his obligations as a guest. As a consequence, he is weakened and receives mortal wounds when he comes up against his enemies. He ties himself to a pillar, in some accounts with his own intestines, to continue standing while fighting to the death.

So, every Father’s Day, presented with descriptors such as World’s Best Dad, men groan- perhaps inwardly- when compared, falsely in most cases I would imagine, to heroes such as the two mentioned before and to any number of masculine exemplars! There are hundreds of songs about heroes but the one that has stuck in my head for almost 50 years is Heroes by David Bowie. Something about it captured the zeitgeist of the late seventies’ for me. I find it as powerful today as when it was conceived by Bowie and Tony Visconti in the Hansa recording studio near the Berlin Wall in 1977.

Ten years before I was born, American humourist James Thurber wrote a justly famous short story about a mild-mannered, man, one Walter Mitty, who daydreams of performing heroic acts of valour while driving into town with his overbearing wife. I suspect that many mild-mannered men to this day inhabit The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  On a trip to Canberra last September, we visited the Australian War Memorial to place a poppy beside the name of my great uncle, John Joseph Mitchell, engraved on the bronze tablets situated in the Hall of Remembrance. He was killed on the Western Front on September 18th, 1917. This is my song, Heroes. [insert song]

We also visited the National Gallery of Australia which hosted an exhibition by Berggruen/Neue Nationalgalerie of Berlin of works by Cezanne, Picasso, Klee, Braque, Matisse, and Giacometti. I, as usual when face to face with creative genius, could barely breathe. Staggered by the range of artistic brilliance on show, I moved through the exhibition in a trance for over two hours. I could have stayed two weeks and not have exhausted what was on offer- but stamina these days is rather diminished. I was particularly struck by Paul Klee’s paintings.

Towards the end of his life, he contracted the autoimmune skin disease of scleroderma and, faced with approaching death, Klee reacted in 1939 with a hitherto unparalleled increase in creative activity: he created 1253 drawings, including numerous images containing children. On his tombstone is written, I cannot be grasped in the here and now, for my dwelling place is as much among the dead as the yet unborn. You know,I think Paul Klee qualifies for the title hero.

A Bunch of Lonesome Heroes (Words and Music by Leonard Cohen)

A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes
Were smoking out along the open road
The night was very dark and thick between them
Each man beneath his ordinary load

“I’d like to tell my story”
Said one of them so young and bold
“I’d like to tell my story
Before I turn into gold”

But no one really could hear him
The night so dark and thick and green
Well, I guess that these heroes must always live there
Where you and I have only been

Put out your cigarette, my love
You’ve been alone too long
And some of us are very hungry now
To hear what it is you’ve done that was so wrong

I sing this for the crickets
I sing this for the army
I sing this for your children
And for all who do not need me

“I’d like to tell my story,”
Said one of them so bold
“Oh, yes, I’d like to tell my story
‘Cause you know, I feel I’m turning into gold”

“Heroes” (Words and Music by Quentin Bega)

An old and rather feeble stooped man walked past

a bunch of loitering teenage boys and girls last night

They gathered round him bravely just to raise some hell

They punched and kicked him mercilessly as he fell

There on the ground they jumped upon his grey old head

Filmed the scene when whistles sounded and they fled

Posting their barbaric act to all the social sites

Shared with others of their ilk as their passage rites

Now these fleeing heroes don’t think they’re useless zeroes

That ignoring what was gory will inflate their deed to glory

Shoplifting spotless branded gear without a telling bloodstain smear

Walk past their parents’ cheerful cry of “A good night, was it, dear?

Sleep well now, you hear!”

At the memorial service a troop of comrades frail

Told of selfless sacrifices made always without fail

And as the last post sounded in the midst of all their grief

The knocking at the parents’ door was met with disbelief

That their honour student daughter and her friends the other night

Could perpetrate a crime so vile and leave a lasting blight

On all touched by their violent deed the ripples outwards spread

Affecting everyone except the old man who is dead

Now these blank-faced heroes are branded useless zeroes

And as the cases do unfold, they listen to the stories told

By victim impact statements made and how a price must now be paid

To never hear their parents’ cry, “A good night, was it, dear?

Sleep well now you hear! A good night, was it, dear? Sleep well now, you hear!-you hear…”

Credits: All written text, song lyrics andmusic (including background music) written and composed by Quentin Bega unless otherwise specified in the credits section after individual posts. Illustrative excerpts from other texts identified clearly within each podcast. I donate to and use Wikipedia frequently as one of the saner sources of information on the web.

Technical Stuff: Microphone-songs Shure SM58; (for the podcast spoken content) Audio Technica AT 2020 front-facing with pop filter); Apogee 76K also used for songs and spoken text. For recording and mixing down: 64-bit N-Track Studio 10 Extended used; Rubix 22 also used for mixing of microphone(s) and instruments. I use the Band in a Box/RealBand 2023 combo for music composition.