Musical Memories - barba, ba barba, ba barba poux, barbapoux, barbapoux...

Y' avait dans mon village
Un homme qui  appelé Poux
Il avait une barbe
Qui était pleine de poux.
Barbapoux, Barbapoux, Barbapoux, Barbapoux. 

Tout au fond de la mer les poissons sont assis,
Les poissons sont assis, ah! ah! ah!
Attendant patiemment qu’les pêcheurs soient partis
Qu’les pêcheurs soient partis ah! ah! ah!
Ohé du bateau, du grand mât, de la hune,
Ohé du voilier, du grand mât, des huniers !

Il y a des vétérans tout barbus, tout fripés
Echappés par hasard des ham’çons, des filets

Et les jeunes poissons sont là aussi souvent
Egayant les bas-fonds de leurs cris, de leurs chants.....etc etc etc!

Help!! Took a trip back down memory lane to our our childrens' childhood (son is visiting this weekend), found a bumper version of  Chansons et Comptines -  a staple of many a journey down the autoroute - the track sampler is on a continuous loop in the bowels of my machine, there's no escape. Rescue me, somebody!

It's strange how evocative music can be, isn't it?  Last time daughter was home we unearthed another old favourite from way back: Jil Caplan's La Charmeuse de Serpents and were instantly transported back 15 years or more, to lazy, hazy, hot summers, (those French school holidays were looonng),  the people carrier stuffed to the windows with all the clobber needed to make a tent home from home for a fortnight, three weeks, longer... (who's counting?).

 Back then modern technology consisted of the in -car cassette player, no hand held video games, (the GP offspring were kept busy with their Hoopi Club colouring and quiz books..."Spot a man in a black beret...a field of corn....a registration number beginning with...") We listened to Times Tables tapes, Jeeves and Wooster, CS Lewis' Narnia tales. Lest readers think we were just too Good To Be True, I'm sure less "worthy" stuff eventually appeared on the playlist (Spice Girls, anybody?). I seem to remember making valiant, if half-hearted attempts to infiltrate slightly more "worthy" material into the running order - this was back in my more evangelical days, as a result of which I'm now unable to listen to any Matt Redman (actually there are other more theological reasons for my aversion but we'll not go there), without experiencing waves of carsickness. Oh and not forgetting "Delirious,"same problem there, and the rest of the family always maintained that it wasn't possible to hear these last two over the roar of the car engine on the autoroute.  Poor Matt and Co were generally reserved for the last , hot, grumbly, tense few miles on country roads, as we tried to find the campsite without coming to blows over the mapreading. This was before sat navs, don't forget.  Hence I'll forever associate worship songs  like "Undignified," with cries of "Are we nearly there, yet?" and the sickly taste of Riccola boiled sweets, before that glorious moment before we finally  drew up at our  little orange and blue tent, our home from home.  Happy days...

Funnily enough, on a camping holiday a couple of years ago,  son and his pals ended up at one of the sites that he remembers visiting with us. Funny old world. Though I suspect they didn't drive through the gates to the strains of Barbapoux!