Occasional posts on subjects including field recording, London history and literature, other websites worth looking at, articles in the press, and news of sound-related events.
TWENTY YEARS AGO or more you might have occasionally heard the word ‘sherricking’, as in ‘she gave him a right good sherricking’, and it refers to a woman giving her man a public and no-quarter-given character reference for his various failings – fooling around, spending all his money in the pub, being useless. I remember it used by a few Irish people in west London, and the word crops up here and there on the net. Some funny posts on a (now defunct) Scottish local history website recall the custom:
So a sherricking was a fairly low-risk strategy on the woman’s part, as it was carried out in public view and earshot. It was a performance or ritual summoning an audience and in which the participants had different roles expected of them. Rows in the street between couples nowadays don’t seem to have that division of labour. Both the man and the woman are likely to yell at each other.
Further back in time whole communities had developed rituals around marital discord, and they had a strong sound element in their performance. Samuel Pepys made the following entry in his diary for the 10th of June, 1667:
What was a ‘riding’? Lord Baybrooke’s notes in the 1893 edition of Pepy’s diary offer this explanation:
On a side note, drums seem to have been the cheapest or most readily available musical instrument in street life for a long time. Most town criers used them before town councils upgraded them to classier horns and bells. It’d also be interesting to know why the humorous figure of the cuckold has disappeared from popular culture as completely as the once-common and noisy rituals of public shaming.
The balloonist in the desert is dreaming
The Binaural Diaries of Ollie Hall
The Ragged Society of Antiquarian Ramblers
Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology
World Forum for Acoustic Ecology