On Friday we went to hear the MPO play The Mermaid by Alexander Zemlinsky. It's a very passionate, evocative piece, which brings the power of the sea right into the concert hall. In the midst of all this oceanic swirl, a graceful solo violin represents Hans Christian Andersen's soul-seeking, experience-hungry, love-lorn Little Mermaid.

The picture above is of the mermaid in Songkhla, Thailand (and although I tend to think of them as creatures of Celtic and Norse mythology, mermaids have a much broader geographic range than that).

I have no photographic record, unfortunately, of my visit to the Andersen mermaid's famous embodiment in Copenhagen. But she figures in quite an early memory of mine. I had an old-fashioned copy of HCA's fairy tales (one of the many old, worn books I inherited from who knows where). And precisely on the day I had been reading The Little Mermaid, there was an item on lunchtime radio about the statue. I remember finding that so unbelievably creepy that I couldn't even bring myself to mention it to my parents. It was like the radio people knew...

It's difficult to locate the report I must have heard, but from the early 1960s onwards, the Copenhagen statue has frequently been the target of attacks, so I'm guessing I was hearing about an early instance of those.

I reread the story the other day on the way to work. I remember finding it a little grisly: the cutting out of the tongue; that shuddery, polyp- and snake-infested place where the witch lives; the sensation of walking as if on knives, once the mermaid had traded her tail for feet... I'd totally forgotten the emotional blackmail of the sanctimonious "daughters of the air" at the end: "for every day on which we find a good child, who is the joy of his parents and deserves their love, our time of probation is shortened"... Yeah, right... It's still a powerful tale, though.

And mermaids feature, of course, in many a Manx yarn. The ben varrey didn't enjoy a good rep, figuring almost universally as a tricksy, untrustworthy kind of creature. Not as bad as the creepy glashtyn though, whose handsome human body turned into a water horse as soon as the cock crew, allowing him to drag his prey to the sea to be drowned.

This was all part of my youthful imaginary archive. How could there not be mermaids on those rocks at the back of Peel Castle?



Or at hauntingly beautiful Niarbyl?



And wasn't it from just such a fisherman's cottage that the glashtyn tried to drag poor Kirree Quayle?



We also watched Hail, Caesar! last week. As it happens, one of the little cameos in this highly enjoyable look at the 1950s Hollywood entertainment machine featured a woman in a mermaid tail (getting a little tight, because she's pregnant), who stars in a Esther Williams-style swimming display.

(Other pieces of celluloid in the works as the story unfolds involve scenes from the life of Christ, from the set of which George Clooney is kidnapped, necessitating that he spend the entire movie in a Roman-soldier outfit; a sailors' tap-dance routine; and some horseback acrobatics from a singing cowboy. It's all good fun.)

The movie definitely doesn't take itself seriously, and it may be fatuous to wonder about a "point". But to me the point is this: The central character is surrounded by siren songs -- from big business, from left-wing idealists, from organized religion, or from Hollywood dream-merchants themselves. But this is a guy who knows what he's good at, and just gets on and does it.

He's not out to change the world. He's not out to upgrade his career. He's not out to see in Hollywood any more than the froth it is. He just gets on with his job.

Sometimes we need to let the mermaids sing on, and just get on with our lives...