Ah, sir, times is hard, times is hard

For his birthday tomorrow, my father requested meat pies. So I spent this morning and afternoon preparing the different kinds of filling, pulled pork with improvised barbecue sauce and curried beef with onions; rolling out the dough, crimping and brushing the pies with egg: I have just put the lot in the refrigerator to await the celebratory dinner. Yes, of course I listened to Sweeney Todd all the while. What do you take me for?

(Incidentally: edible anatomy lessons. I so need a copy of this book.)

And I love how the tale does not stop safely in the past. The last "Ballad of Sweneey Todd" is where melodrama turns into myth; the foolish barber and his wife are done with, but like a hungry ghost or a thoughtless promise, once called up, Sweeney will never disappear.

His needs are few, his room is bare
He hardly uses his fancy chair
The more he bleeds, the more he lives
He never forgets and he never forgives
Perhaps today you gave a nod
To Sweeney Todd
The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sweeney wishes the world away, Sweeney's weeping for yesterday
Hugging the blade, waiting the years
Hearing the music that nobody hears
Sweeney waits in the parlor hall, Sweeney leans on the office wall
No one can help, nothing can hide you
Isn't that Sweeney there beside you?

The elements that create him are quintessentially Victorian, but in the steam-whistle shriek that heralds his moments of manifestation and murder, the industrial design of the original production, the mechanized efficiency of his barber's chair, he's a creature of the modern age. Everywhere, anyone. He's out of time and he will never die. There is something in this characterization of the vampire: which is famously balanced between the old and the new worlds as well.

(And I get T.S. Eliot overtones, but I doubt this is an intentional intertext.)