Musings on Missed Boats and Other Things

Why-oh-why did I not have a CD with me? There was Cliff Richards' publisher sitting one sofa away, there was someone offering to give him a copy of my CD if I had one...
Bah!
Today, I have donned an apron and I'm listening to the Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band and not cleaning while I do so.
I'd forgotten how many TV themes they incrporated into their songs: just little snatches, like sampling. It's not so new, is it?
I remember as a child sitting at the piano and picking out Jollity Farm. Sight-reading eluded me (nought out of ten in the Guildhall Piano Exams) and I got to Grade Three piano before my teacher, Miss Matthews, realised that I could not read a single dot on the page, but was merely remembering the tunes and going home and copying them. Shortly afterwards she sacked me from my piano lessons. Anyway, I didn't want to play those pieces of music. There was the occasional good one, a fantastic Bach study, for instance, but most of them were horrible, a bit like eating cold porridge. Jollity Farm had easy chords that repeated and was simple to learn.
Although their silliness can get wearing after a double album's worth of listening, they were all extraordinarily good musicians and lots of people used to listen to them. My friend at school, Debbie, had a cousin who was a Student, and that's how she heard them. Smeg from King Kurt had a phobia about Eleven Moustachioed Daughters and couldn't be within earshot of it, a similar thing to my fear of The Laughing Policeman by Charles Penrose.
Next up on the jukebox is the merry little squeaks of Shirley Temple. It will be tempting to see if I can still tapdance.
Silently, though, in my slippers on the lino.