Tom Pillibi

So many thoughts and phrases that pass through my mind end up as a cue for a song.

Getting my supplements ready for the evening and morning doses set me off this time:

"Nothing could be finer than to take your nattokinase in the mo-o-orning..." (Tune here)

And this afternoon, my mandatory low-oxalate choices for all foods started me singing "Black cherry jam is quite a find, perfectly sweet and charming", to the tune of Tom Pillibi.  But do you even know that song?

My father made our family a record player. He used a bathroom stool for the main part of the body, and cut up his aertex shirt for the speaker covers, and bought a kit to make the working parts.

We didn't have money to buy records, but his firm (Everready) gave him a good expenses account for his worldwide travels selling their batteries, so he used to bring back records from the countries he visited all over the globe.

One of the records he brought back was this one, Tom Pillibi sung by Julie Andrews.

It came out in 1960, when I was three. I absolutely loved it and used to sing along and dance to it, throughout my childhood.

There were things I didn't notice about it — or just accepted — when I was a child, that catch my attention now.

One (these days this irritates me) is the part that says:

So, with a lover, as with a book,

Don't trust the cover or you might well be hooked.

Surely the whole point of a book cover is to hook a reader, and surely you should be able to trust the cover to accurately convey what the content is likely to be. A lot of thought goes into book covers for this very purpose. But I didn't think of that when I was three.

And then there's all the business about the 'technique' of the young man in the song — 'He has a very good technique'. 

Oh, do you remember that? 'His technique'! It's what we always used to say, as teenagers. I remember girls talking about boys they'd met at a dance — a 'disco', by my teenage years — boys they fancied, asking, "What's his technique?" Oh, my goodness, that feels like a whole world away, boys setting about their courting, their 'technique' for flirting and attracting a girl. Different times, eh?

But you can see now, "Black cherry jam is quite a find, perfectly sweet and charming" fits just right.

On the B side of that record was Lazy Afternoon.

 

 I can see the appeal of it now (I think) though I had a fairly low opinion of it when I was three. Part of me is still three, and still finds it a little tiresome.

But, Julie Andrews! The way she says "hand" and "lazy"! English diction from 1960, and yes, ordinary people did speak like that. Only gradually have we reached the place where even hymns in church van to be sung with an American accent.

Here are the voices of 1960s England.