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.