I discovered through Twitter that today is Star Wars Day. That’s because ‘May the Fourth’ sounds very similar to ‘May the Force’; the latter phrase, I discovered, being a line of dialogue from that popular film franchise.

Liz, it seems, is a fan. She tweeted:

Her name was Yoda,

a showgirl she was.

This is very funny because Yoda – who is a character, I discovered, from the aforementioned box-office smash – frequently forms unusual speech patterns, based around an object-subject-verb word order. Liz takes this anastrophe and applies its logic to – what I discovered to be – the opening lines of the 1978 Barry Manilow song ‘Copacabana (At the Copa)’, substituting the name of the original protagonist, ‘Lola’, for that of ‘Yoda’, in a perfectly applied feminine rhyme. And that is why I found it so instantly funny.

I joined in the fun by posting up a Star Wars poem. I confess that I don’t know a huge amount about the films, but it’s amazing what five short hours on Wookiepedia can do.

I noted privately to Liz that Toby Salt seems rather aloof from the whole May the Fourth/Force thing, having not so much as mentioned it on Twitter all day. He seems far more concerned with advertising his forthcoming book and festival appearances. He has nearly two thousand followers now. I have fifty-two.

Saturday May 5th

Breaking Bard

English teacher turns

Shakespearian drug chef,

cooking and selling

crystal macbeth.

Dylan has been making me help him revise again. Sometimes the commitment of being a one-day-a-week father hangs heavy upon me, like a thick wool cardigan weighed down with a manual on responsible parenting in each pocket.

He’s studying Macbeth. Stuart is taking him to a performance tomorrow night at the Globe, with Bryan Cranston in the title role. They’ll be standing in the pit, he tells me, rather than watching it properly from the comfort of seats, as they would have done in Shakespeare’s time, and which I think is a little bit cheap of Stuart, if I’m honest.

Sunday May 6th

I’ve now received more than two hundred messages on Twitter informing me that Tatooine has three moons, not two. And that I hadn’t even spelt it correctly. Some people really need to reassess their life choices: Tatooine isn’t even real, for heaven’s sake! It’s just a stupid made-up planet from an exploitative, merchandise-driven film franchise cynically developed to extract as much money as possible from the pockets of children and adults who never quite managed to grow up. Given that, how many moons it has or doesn’t have is something of a moot point.

Liz has kept her copy-editing impulses in check and remained silent on the whole issue.

I posted up a poem entitled ‘Pedants’ in revenge:

Foot soldiers in the War on Error,

they’re here to save us from ourselves

with Fowler’s Modern English Usage

(first edition, nineteen twelve).