You Say Spadina

Look at this: it is October and the sky today was so blue that I didn't see a single cloud all day long. Nor is this because I was sequestered in a library during daylight hours or hunched over my laptop with the blinds down - on the contrary, I took my work outside and lay on a sunlounger in the back garden listening to the trickling of the fish pond. Incidentally, the road you can see here is called Spadina, a word which so obviously ought be pronounced Spadeena that it has taken me weeks to accept and begin to use Spa-dye-na. This must be an irritant for the Torontonians I speak to. More irritating by far, however, is spending an entire month with Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off by George and Ira Gershwin runnning endlessly round one's mind, only with potatoes and tomatoes cast out and lyrics that instead run "You say Spadeena, I say Spa-dye-na...". This is aggravated by the fact that almost nothing rhymes with Spa-dye-na, so I can't get further than the first line without recourse to anatomical references that don't make for family listening.
But for some reason nothing I listen to is ever catchy enough to displace it. Handel operas are all very well (yes, they are) but I admit that for the most part they lack that foot-tapping je ne sais quoi. I had a bash at trying to knock the Gershwin out with some Marvin Gaye but catchy tunes aren't really the bag there. The best I have managed so far is Think About You from Guns n Roses' Appetite for Destruction. This is an album I treasured as a ten year old despite its highly unsuitable lyric content and general inappropriateness, and with which I was reunited some months ago by a similarly unlikely fan, to my lasting delight. Luckily the track in question is quite respectable, and the crippling shame of being caught singing GnR songs is abated by the fact that half my collegaues here are closeted, or not so closeted, fans; indeed, one of them burnt the album for me (possibly only to stop me singing Gershwin). Anyway, it could be a lot worse. It could be Gilbert and Sullivan.