Albatross (metaphor) attention to her merchandise, while the potential customer keeps asking questions about the product, like "What flavour is it?" and "Do you get wafers with it?". Finally the man buys two albatrosses for nine pence each. The salesgirl then shouts she is selling "gannet on a stick." Later during the episode, several other characters in other sketches shout "Albatross" for seemingly no reason at all. Albatross (metaphor) The word albatross is sometimes used metaphorically to mean a psychological burden that feels like a curse. It is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798).
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 18751 September 1912) was an English composer and conductor of mixed race; his mother was an English woman and his father was a Sierra Leone Creole physician. Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the "African Mahler" when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas based on the epic poem, "Song of Hiawatha" by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898, when he was 22. He married an Englishwoman,