A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter H

haverel

Adjective
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Haverel is a Scots word for a foolish, simple-minded, or ineffectual person; it is often used dismissively to mean “a mere fool.”

Detailed Definition
In Scots dialect, a haverel is someone regarded as silly, foolish, or lacking good sense. Although it names a person and is therefore grammatically a noun, it can function descriptively in phrases such as “mere haverels,” where it characterizes people as inferior or foolish. In poetry, the term may convey affectionate teasing, scorn, or a speaker’s strong preference for one person over others.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Joanna Baillie’s “Saw Ye Johnny Comin,” the speaker praises Johnny above all other local young men: “The brawest lads about the place Are a’ but haverels to him.” Here, haverels means “fools” or “insignificant simpletons.” The speaker claims that even the finest-looking lads in the area seem foolish and unimpressive compared with Johnny.
Additional Notes
Haverel is a Scots dialect term, also spelled havrel in some sources. It is related to haver, a Scots verb meaning to talk foolishly, babble, or speak nonsense. In Baillie’s line, a’ but means “all merely” or “all nothing but,” intensifying the comparison: the other lads are “nothing but fools” beside Johnny. Do not confuse haverel with a formal Adjective. It is principally a noun, though it may be used in a descriptive way when applied to people.
Also Known As
Babbling Fool Nonsensical Talker Scots Haverer Idle Prater
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