A new Christmas song

I'd like to introduce you to a brand new Christmas song, composed and performed by two very good friends who live in Norway: Edith Nilsberg and Orlando Ortiz.

Edith, a Cumbrian, and a gifted singer throughout her life, has composed the song, and after a couple of years during which her singing has taken a back seat, her voice is very much back on form with this new number.

The superbly talented Mr Ortiz does everything else: all the instruments, all the technical studio work. His easy ability on guitar is particularly noticeable here.

Together, they have produced a happy little song which should bring a smile to everyone's face.

I'm sorry it wasn't ready to upload until after Christmas, but it will still be here for you next year!

Click here to listen to Merry Christmas by Edith and Orlando

The Very Best Chicken

We played this game in the playground at my school, St. Peter's RC Primary in Falcon Gardens, Edinburgh. I've never seen any mention of it anywhere else, and I've never come across anyone else who has played it, so I thought I ought to blog about it so that it was archived for posterity.

It's in the form of a little play.

---

THE VERY BEST CHICKEN

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Mistress
The Maid
The Witch
The Very Best Chicken
Other Chickens (played by everyone else)

SCENE: The Mistress' parlour.
PRESENT: Mistress; Maid.

Mistress: I'm going to the market. I want you to take care of my chickens while I'm out. Don't let the witch get my Very Best Chicken!


They go out and count the chickens, and the mistress points out which one is the Very Best Chicken.

LATER: 
The witch arrives and knocks on the door. The maid opens it but doesn't recognise her.


Witch [in a creaky, old-womanish voice]: Can you please get me a glass of water?
Maid: Yes of course. Just wait there while I get it.


The maid goes off to the kitchen. As soon as her back is turned, the witch sneaks in and heads for the chicken coop. She snatches the Very Best Chicken and runs off with it. When the maid gets back with the water, the witch has gone. 

LATER:
The mistress returns home. 
Mistress: Where are my glasses? I want to go and count my chickens.


The maid doesn't know where the glasses are and makes various suggestions, which can be improvised by the players. The only one I remember that was always suggested at some point, was, "They're up the lum!"


When the glasses are found, the mistress and the maid head for the chicken coop, where the mistress carefully counts the chickens, and finds one missing. To her horror, the missing chicken is The Very Best Chicken, and she is understandably angry with the maid.


Mistress [in a voice of doom]: Where is my Very Best Chicken?
All remaining chickens: It's in the Witch's Den! 
[The whole thing, and particularly the word "de-en," should be shouted in a sing-song way, with two syllables, the second syllable being lower than the first.]

The mistress grabs the maid by one arms and starts swinging her round in little circles, attempting to smack her on the bottom, while the maid attempts to get away. [This is like a scene from a panto.] 

When the mistress tires of this, the game starts over. She selects a new Very Best Chicken, and goes off to market again. The story repeats itself until no chickens are left. They are all in the witch's den. 

---

I'd love to hear from anyone who has every played, or heard of, a playground game anything like this. If you attended St Pete's and played it there, please get in touch! If you think the story sounds familiar and you might be able to offer some guesses about the origins of the game, I want to hear from you. Or if you just want to make a comment of some sort, please do.


It was actually my favourite playground game at one point in my childhood. We'd recruit players by running round the playground, holding hands, and shouting, "Who wants a game of The Very Best Chicken?" (All games were recruited in this way.) Other kids would grab a hand and run with us until we had enough to get started. For this game you'd need a minimum of 5 players, but that only left you with one spare chicken, so it was much better with more.

HORNIMAN AND SIR

This is a song I remember from very early childhood on BBC's Listen With Mother. I can't find any reference to it online. It was probably one of those very ephemeral things that was written for one episode of the programme, sung and forgotten ... except that I'm sure they sang it quite often. I can remember almost all of it except for part of one line. Whenever I'm walking in the rain, I find it going through my head.

Here are the lyrics:

Horniman and Sir,
Off we go together.
Horniman and Sir,
We don't mind the weather.
Dashing through the puddles,
Splashing through the rain,
[dah dah dah dah dumdy dah]
and off we go again!

If you happen to remember it, please get in touch! I'm beginning to think I'm the only person on the planet who remembers this song. Who wrote it? Who sang it?

[Edited 121017 to change the word "Todd" to "Sir"]

BREAKING NEWS! 24.12.17

With a great deal of help from Mary, I have acquired an audio recording of the original broadcast. I won't have time to deal with it properly over the next few busy days, but as a little Christmas present for everyone who's commented on this thread over the past seven years, here's the updated version of the verses. The sound is a bit blurry on some of the lines, but we're pretty sure it is as you can see here. Oh, and it's not HORNIMAN - it's HORNYMAN! (I've also added a few simple guitar chords if anyone fancies trying to play it. Afraid my skills don't quite reach to transcribing the piano part accurately - someone else is welcome to try that once we upload the audio.)

Merry Christmas everyone! 

Johannes Würmchen

My mother, who, unlike my father, was not really a German scholar, had a little German nursery rhyme which she'd recite every time we saw a ladybird. Most English-speaking children, of course, will come out with some variant on this one:

Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home!
Your house is on fire and your children alone!

But Vere had a German rhyme. As someone who didn't do German at school, and whose sum knowledge of the language is the vocabulary associated with Christmas carols (sheep, angels, trees, anyone?) I had no idea how to spell many of the words.

For some reason it came back to me just now, and I've spent about half an hour trying to track it down via Google and my Langensheidt Compact German Dictionary. Since it doesn't seem to be anywhere online in the version I know it, I'm quoting it here.

Interestingly, the modern German word for "ladybird" seems to be "Maikäfer" but Vere's word was the more poetic, and probably now archaic, "Johannes Würmchen" which seems to mean something like, "St John's little bug".

Here's Vere's version, anyway:

Johnnes Würmchen, flieg!

Dein Vater ist im Krieg,

Dein Mutter ist im Pomerland,

Und Pomerland ist angebrannt.

(Ladybird, fly away! Your father's off to war, your mother's in Pomerania, and Pomerania is on fire. At least that's what they told me angebrannt meant - it doesn't seem to be in my dictionary, so if you know different ...)

Vere almost certainly learned this from her own mother, Allison Robertson, who had gone to a sort of finishing school in Bad Kreutznach in the latter years of the 19th century when she was a teenager. Alice (as she was usually known) spoke fluent German.

Gote Bridge reopening - a cause for celebration!

Above - Gote Bridge after the floods. All those stones were brought by the floodwaters. The original riverbank starts where the little bit of grass, bottom right, can be seen.

Ever since the floods in November last year, everyone living in this neck of the woods has had their lives disrupted by the closed bridges across the Derwent. Some, like the Workington North Bridge, collapsed completely, but others, like Broughton Bridge and Gote Bridge in Cockermouth, are not beyond repair. Work is now starting, dredging the river and repairing the bridges, and some of them will be opening in March and April.

Those of us who live in and around Cockermouth will be very happy indeed when Gote Bridge opens on March 24th, and it occurred to us this evening that they'll probably move the barricades ever so quietly in the dead of night. Should we let them? We think this should be cause for celebration!

Let's find out when they're planning to open the bridge, and descend upon it en masse to dance, sing, shout and cheer! ...and drive cars across it, of course.

Above - dredging the Derwent

I've created a Facebook group to help spread the word, here but you don't have to be a member of Facebook to get involved. Just tell your friends, spread the word, and let's have some fun!

Radio Cumbria calls

I've been invited to contribute to a feature on BBC Radio Cumbria called Little Cumbria. I hope this doesn't mean the contributors are being compared to the cast of Little Britain ... surely not! Cumbrians are far too sensible for that. Aren't they?

Normally people are invited to keep a diary for a week, writing exactly 130 words per day, and these are read out during the Ian Timms show in the early evening. Steven Greaves, the producer, chatted to me on the phone, and when I mentioned that this would sit rather well with the Flickr project I'm doing, 2010 - A Year In Pictures, he suggested we combine the two. I'm still not entirely sure how they're going to provide links to my photostream on the radio, but to make things easier I'm creating a page on links on our own website. It should be easier to read out marshallmcgurk.com/flickr.htm than http://www.flickr.com/photos/allybeag/collections/72157623205933005/!

So I've to select 5 of the photos I've uploaded to the YIP project, and write 130 words about each. Well. How hard can that be? Actually, that's the hardest part. I could write several pages about each, quite easily, but only 130 words? It's a good exercise for the brain, though, and I seem to have managed it, though it feels a bit like writing War and Peace via SMS-speak.

All five of these mini-masterpieces will appear here shortly.

Not Gerry, but Scamp

YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

All I'd wished for was something to occupy me for 4 hours in Workington, while I was waiting for my car to be serviced at Kwik-Fit. I could see how I could spend maybe two of those hours wandering round the shops, so I took my bike with me in order to have a bit of an explore further afield as well.

SWANS
First I cycled down to the Mill Field and took photos of a family of starstruck swans who kept posing for the camera like the supermodels they know they are. Had a look at the Yearl with its rushing torrents of water, chatted to a dogwalker, discovered a couple of cycle tracks I hadn't known about, and headed back to the centre of town, having used up only 1½ of those 4 hours.

LOST IN SCOPE
The charity shops were calling me. In Scope, I found the two voluntary ladies discussing a small dog, which was sitting, quite unconcerned, in the middle of the shop floor. It had apparently just wandered in and sat down. Collarless, its identity was a mystery.

The volunteers didn't know what to do. They tried phoning the dog warden, who doesn't work Saturday afternoons, and suggested just turning the poor beast back out into the street, which seemed a bit heartless, with all the traffic out there. They phoned the police, who wouldn't have anything to do with it, and said they should "reject it" which amounted to the same advice as that of the dog warden.

They phoned various animal shelters and vets, but most of them were closed on Saturday afternoons. By this time another customer had become interested, and tried feeling for a microchip under the dog's skin, but couldn't find anything. She also noticed he had lost a claw, and had a rather sore looking patch on his paw.

A RAY OF HOPE
The volunteers were becoming quite disturbed by it all. We all had animals of our own at home, so couldn't take him back with us without causing domestic chaos. Then I remembered that our vet's surgery in Cockermouth have an out-of-hours service - I'd used it once before late at night. I finally tracked them down on my phone, and they said, "yes, bring the dog in as soon as your car is ready - just ring to let us know when you'll be here, and we'll go to the surgery to meet you." Nice people. I have to recommend Millcroft Vets here, as no-one else offered to do anything helpful.

UNEXPECTED DOG-WALKING
So it looked as though I was lumbered for the rest of the afternoon. I was the only one with a car, and the time to spare to look after the animal. The other customer, whose little boy looked like he would happily keep the doggie, helpfully nipped out and bought a cheap collar and lead, which we attached to the stray, and off I marched out of Scope, with the most unusual thing I've yet acquired in a charity shop.

A TEMPORARY NAME
Feeling a bit silly walking a nameless dog I decided to give him a temporary name, so he became Gerry for the duration. He did look very like a Gerry for some reason.

MORE PATTABLE THAN MY DOGS
I was surprised at how many people stopped and patted him - particularly quite small children who were more at his level. Nobody ever stops to pat my dogs! Gerry was perfectly behaved. He trotted along all cheerful and alert, never bothering if we passed another dog, never barking, never rushing ahead or trying to pull me along. You could tell he came from a good home where he was well looked after, and of course this meant that someone, somewhere, must be frantic with worry about him by now.

WORKINGTON HALL
We walked around the shopping area for a while, hoping someone would suddenly come rushing over shouting, "There he is! Thank goodness!" but nobody recognised him. I could see I was going to be on my feet all afternoon, so I checked my bike was securely chained to a railing, and headed off for the grounds around old Workington Hall, a nice grassy area for dogs. (I'll come back later with the sad & disgraceful story of Workington Hall.)

HOME, BOY!
Gerry was very pleased to run on the grass, although obviously I couldn't let him run loose. He had loads of energy for one so small! As we headed back towards the road I realised he seemed to know where he was going, so I let him lead me, in the hope that he'd head for home. I kept saying "home!" in a meaningful voice, and he took me down several footpaths and across the bridge over the Derwent so that we were heading towards Seaton. This seemed just the sort of place he might live - loads of houses there, and for a little while I thought we'd cracked it, but suddenly he paused, and looked puzzled. He couldn't figure out which way to go now. I had to remember that he's only a Jack Russell, not a Border Collie: my dogs can find their way home no bother at all.

"HE THINKS YOU HAVE HIS DOG!"
Back in the town centre, I found him dragging me suddenly towards the door of the multi-storey car park. This seemed like a clue. Perhaps his family had arrived by car and parked there. I was about to go inside to see if he could lead me to his car when my phone rang. Kwik-Fit were ringing to tell me my car was nearly ready, and by the way, there was a man there who seemed to think I had his dog!

WET
I couldn't believe it! How on earth had he tracked me down to Kwik-Fit? I told Kwik-Fit man to keep the dog-owner there, as I'd get there as quickly as I could, just as the heavens opened and soaked both me and Gerry quite thoroughly.

JOYFUL REUNION
So there he was - the dog owner sitting in his car in the Kwik-Fit forecourt. Nice chap, obviously very very fond of his dog, and very very delighted to be reunited with him. I sat in their car for a bit telling my half of the story. Seems they'd been in another shop just a few doors away from Scope, and had tied the dog up outside. When they looked out, he'd gone - spooked by something probably - slipped his collar and departed.

DETECTIVE WORK
They'd been searching all afternoon. They'd been to the animal shelters, (which had been closed) and phoned the police, who, although they'd been no help at the time, had obviously logged the phone call from the shop, and were able to tell him that his dog had been found in Scope. So he'd visited the shop, where the ladies had told him his dog was in safe hands, and they also remembered me telling them that I was picking up my car from Kwik-Fit at 5 o'clock.

I was so happy to see them reunited! Oh, and they do live at Seaton, and the dog's real name is Scamp. (I still think he looked more like a Gerry.)