The pace of the song is slow, with a reasonably complex guitar accompaniment in the key of D. There are 10 two-line verses broken into two sections by a 6-line bridge in the middle, which I then return to at the end of the song to bring it to a conclusion. I use the term ‘bridge’ rather loosely here, since I don’t think that this song conforms to the formal definition of the term (as presented in Wikipedia, for example).
The song starts with a somewhat obscure reference to a story one of my psychology teachers told me when I was an undergraduate. He was talking about the fixed action patterns in the courtship rituals of sticklebacks. Apparently there was a tank of sticklebacks on a laboratory windowsil, once upon a time, and every time the red post van drove up the road below to pick up the mail from the postbox in the afternoon, the sticklebacks got very agitated and excited. He explained that it was because from that distance the post van appeared to the fish as a moving red dot, and this was a key trigger for eliciting part of their mating ritual. So, my first verse is:
Post boxes....In the bridge section, I look back almost nostalgically to the time of dip pens and ink wells. I went to school in the days where each class had an Ink Monitor (a boy who was designated to walk around the schoolroom with a huge bottle or jar of ink, filling each individual well that was sunken into each pupil’s desk. And, of course, there would be the blotting paper, too. I also think about the gradual demise of lickable glue on stamps and envelope flaps: all part of the letter-writing experience of yesteryear.
In England they are mainly red;
Pity the poor stickleback
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