The Sloop John B

When I change radio stations in the car, they tend to stay changed. The key determining factor for me seems to be what I listen to in the morning. I went through a fairly long phase of pretending to be a proper grown up and listening to the Today programme on R4, and this meant that I usually caught the 6:30 comedy on the way home, along with other random programmes when driving around from meeting to meeting during the day - Ed Reardon would often be a late morning treat!

But now I have acknowledged the fact that I'm not really a grown up at all and stopped listening to R4. The main reason is that I now start the day with the Chris Evans breakfast show on R2 (perhaps this is a rather bad sign and I really should start drawing a pension any day now). But, even once the breakfast show is long gone, I don't manage to change channels very much, although I do occasionally draw the line at some of Jeremy Vine's lunchtime nonsense and turn off.

R2 tends to go a bit off the safe popular hits piste at 7 o'clock with a selection of Jazz, Folk, Country and so on programmes. Tonight we had a programme from the Cambridge Folk Festival, introduced by Mike Harding amongst others (wasn't he a comedian in a former life?) and one of the acts that they featured was a group called the Fisherman's Friends (from Port Isaac - been there).

One of the songs that they sang was the Sloop John B. Whenever I hear that song, I am transported back to the mid eighties and my first year at grammar school. We had a mad and slightly eccentric music teacher (there were two, and they were both mad and eccentric, but at least this one was mad in a nice way) and quite often our music lessons would consist of nothing more than handing round the song books and having a jolly old sing-a-long, accompanied by our teacher on the piano. Looking back, I remember enjoying this a great deal, and yet I still get a lump in my throat when I hear that song. I think that I must have been having a bad day one time when we sang it, and that the enormity of moving on from the cosy, know the ropes world of junior school to the scary, small fish in big pond world of senior school was weighing heavy on my mind, and I did have to stifle a tear or two as we sang the chorus:

Let me go home

I want to go home

I feel so broke up

I want to go home.

The small matter of a quarter of a century or so has passed, but I still seem to have the occasional day just like that one.