Party Piece

Over tea the other day - or dinner if you consider yourself to be on the other side of the North/South divide - we were chatting about the little things we remember about people. For example, I remember my grandma for her habit of always revealing the end of a film half way through; and I remember my Uncle Charlie for his, far from limitless, stock of corny jokes that he recycled throughout our childhood. We then got on to party pieces: my Auntie Hilda could recite the whole of Stanley Holloway's Albert and the Lion and delivered it in a highly entertaining dramatic oratory style; I had a phase of regaling colleagues with my renditions of popular songs in the style of the pub singer - my version of Shirley Bassey's ode to the vegatable: A Yam What A Yam, had to be heard to be believed; and I could not help but mention a colleague who, after several glasses of brandy, would suspend a large brandy balloon glass from his masculine appendages (I have had many fascinating colleagues over the years).

Later, idling away a couple of spare moments on YouTube - or as I later described what I'd been doing to Mrs C: research for creative writing - I happened across this lovely audio clip of the original Albert and the Lion; it's worth a listen and best of all, because it's not a video clip, you get on with something else whilst listening to it.