Singing drinking songs with my parents

Back in May, then, I was experiencing a crisis of confidence in the project I was embarking on. Too much effort was going into the form, and the content was suffering. What I really wanted was a balance, both in form and content: each would need to be unusual in some way, unexpected in context; but each would need to stem in part from some existing work. I went to Spain to see my Mum for her 60th birthday, and took my laptop with me.

Mum and Dad have fallen in with a good crowd in their little Spanish town. Spanish, German and British pensioners all come together at the Pensionista club every few days, and that was where Mum decided to have her birthday. It was lovely, right up to the point where Mum wanted me to start playing Beatles songs on the guitar. This was the culmination of about an hour of singalong, and only lasted about half an hour, so I can't really complain.

Earlier on, though, they sang a drinking song which you've probably heard. It's actually an old English folk song: Show Me The Way To Go Home. James Campbell and Reginald Connelly popularized it in 1925—this is all unashamedly from Wikipedia—and these days it's occasonally popular, in a pre-WWII music-hall medley style. Wikipedia, with its usual gift for a lepidopterous impaling of every twitching leg of fact, charts its ups and downs in popular culture.

Because of its demotic audience—and demotic performers—a few versions of Show Me... exist. The most frequently sung one, which was also on the song sheet for my Mum's birthday, and also on Wikipedia, is a Latinization of the original. They're generally a bit daft, and make me cringe a bit: I have an aversion from ideas if they're half-baked, however good. But these things do the rounds on email forwards between the post-Facebook generation and they're fun enough in themselves.

It was only on the way home, dizzy with drink, chattering away to my wife, when it suddenly hit me.

Versions.

Variations.

Exercises.

Ninety-nine exercises, based on the same simple song.

Exercises, in song.

And that was it.