Popular Nostalgia

I only went to school for a few years in the 1980s and 1990s, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just me who had to sing at least one song while they were at school!

Here I’m not talking about school songs – only posh schools have them, sometimes in latin, and never in tune – and I’m not even talking about the hymns we had to sing in assembly at primary school (that’s for an entirely different piece!). No, I’m here to remind you all of those songs we had to sing on occassion at primary school from little song books.

You must remember these? Those cheery little numbers from dog eared old books when we ‘did singing’ about “my brother Jim, he’s a fisherman” or Jim McSprocket, who, stunningly and quite brilliantly, built a rocket.

Not every song was about someone by the name of Jim, though, but each book had a theme, and we must have ‘did singing’ for a good few years, as we cracked through quite a number of these books in my time. I remember such delights as “Bath Time (sic)” which was replete with songs about the benefits of personal hygiene, “Tudors & Stuarts” (I’m ‘Enry the Eight I am I am) even stretching to “The Blues” where we would, with our shrill prepubescent voices, warble out about the struggles and strife of pre and post-abolishment blacks in the Deep South ’til our little hearts were content. Oh how we loved that shortnin.

I still remember the often insipid words to many of these tunes, and couldn’t point to a more poignant warning about the effectiveness of brainwashing on young impressionable minds. At least they only used this to fill ours with useless piffle about how you can’t fly to mars with a spaceship made out of old dustbin lids.

Please please please, if you can recall this phenomenon, let me know of the songs you sang, and that it wasn’t just me, in my quaint little country bumpkin school who did this. I’ve still not got over the embarrassment of the old “Who remembers country dancing lessons at school?” No-one did, it would seem.