Sailing to Philadelphia

Kinda dedicating this post to my brother and his to be wifey cause thats how this I got down to writing this post

My brother's girfriend used to stay in Philadelphia, USA.....and in those days when we were studying to be engineers, most of the conversations between my brother and me involved a lot of leg pulling....he did most of the enduring....... while he was still courting her and no one at home knew, I thought it would be a great idea to pull his leg with everyone around................so that May for his birthday I got him this album by Mark Knopfler called Sailing to Philadelphia............... everytime I asked him in front of my family what the name of the album was.............he would look at me and kinda blush and smile at the same time and say softly " Sailing to Philadelphia"....and no one really had a clue why he did that..........and I would have this great feeling of acomplishment................i still do.............those days i was beginning to appreciate good english music from the 70's and 80's.......so I did know about Mark Knopfler...but had never heard much of Dire Straits' music.........

once I was done with all my leg pulling I got down to listening to this cassette.......and then fell in love with the title song " Sailing to Philadelphia" ....and all I knew was that the song was about these two guys who talk about drawing some line........so I did some searching and got the lyrics .........the song is basically about these two surveyors called Charlie Mason and Jeremiah Dixon who drew this line called the Mason -Dixon line to divide the states of Pennsylvania (owned by the Penn family) and Maryland State ( owned by the Calvert family), to solve a dispute over the land between the two families. .....................Mason was an astronomer employed by The Royal Society in Greenwich, England. ...........Dixon was a surveyor from Cockfield in Durham County in England.................. the amazing thing about the work done by these two is that they made their " mark upon the earth" aided by the night sky, the stars and a few instruments..................... though this work was not really groundbreaking, the fact that they created a boundary with near constant latitude is really amazing................recent GPS measurements show that at times they strayed as much as 800 feet and as less as an inch from the constant latitude............during the years of slavery the Mason-Dixon line came to be line dividing America into north and south : freedom and slavery...........

Anyway......am reproducing the lyrics to the song below....

I am Jeremiah Dixon
I am a Geordie boy
A glass of wine with you, sir
And the ladies I'll enjoy
All Durham and Northumberland
Is measured up by my own hand
It was my fate from birth
To make my mark upon the earth...

He calls me Charlie Mason
A stargazer am I
It seems that I was born
To chart the evening sky
They'd cut me out for baking bread
But I had other dreams instead
This baker's boy from the west country
Would join the Royal Society...

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line

Now you're a good surveyor, Dixon
But I swear you'll make me mad
The West will kill us both
You gullible Geordie lad
You talk of liberty
How can America be free
A Geordie and a baker's boy
In the forests of the Iroquois...

Now hold your head up, Mason
See America lies there
The morning tide has raised
The capes of Delaware
Come up and feel the sun
A new morning has begun
Another day will make it clear
Why your stars should guide us here...

We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
A Mason-Dixon Line