Spaceman Came Travelling

I haven't heard this song for such a long time.

This is of course no bad thing. Chris de Burgh is a rolled up jacket sleeved, mono browed buffoon who's best known song is a paean to strange love with Cardinal Wolsey in drag. I have never paid the ferryman, I never even fixed the price, he drowned Mr de Burgh for me for free.

It's Christmas you see, and you'd think Chris' Von Daniken inspired talk of the birth of Messiahs being a 2000 yearly thing heralded by the appearance of the Angel Gabriel in a spaceship would be dominating our local gold station's seasonal output. But they have better taste.

Driving Home for Christmas by that other craggy Chris is their favourite. Possibly because it doesn't contain such lyrical gems as;

"He followed a light and came down to a shed,
Where a mother and child were lying there on a bed,"

Of course, it gets better than that.

We've always wondered what form our first communications with a sentient extra-terrestrial lifeform would be. We've sent them plaques with naked pictures on, a record with birdsong on, or a beamed message to the globular cluster Messier 13 with a digitised image of DNA within. So far, we've heard nothing back, and we're not even sure that if we did, we'd recognise it.

Chris de Burgh himself is in no doubt.

"And it went la la la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la."

Having travelled "for light years of time" - oh and by the way, light years are a measure of distance, not time, you fool - you'd have thought Homo Superior might have something more interesting than that to say on a First Contact. If the Vulcans had said that to us that wondrous day after Zephraim Cochrane had got to Warp 1, we'd have thought they were taking the piss.

"Gort! La la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la" - well, that wouldn't have helped.

"Ulla-la la la la la la la la, la la la la la la la la la" is just about acceptable I suppose, but visitors, travelling spacemen, stick to "Take me to your leader."

Works every time.