Knees Up, Mother Brown

Those were the days! Every good party ended with ‘Knees up, Mother Brown'. In fact, Brighton Lions' Charter Nights did as well. First would be the Hokey Cokey, then the Can-Can followed by ‘Knees up, Mother Brown', after which the President would be lifted onto the shoulders of a couple of Lions while we sang ‘For He's a Jolly Good Fellow', rounded off with ‘Auld Lang Syne'.

Knees up, Mother Brown,
Knees up, Mother Brown,
Under the table you must go,
Ee aye ee aye ee aye o.
And if I catch you bending
I'll saw your legs right off.
Oh, knees up, knees up,
Don't get the breeze up,
Knees up, Mother Brown.

Oh my, what a rotten song,
What a rotten song, what a rotten song.
Oh my, what a rotten song,
And what a rotten singer too-oo-oo.

I don't think I could keep going through all that lot these days, and nor could most of my friends and acquaintances. There's Bruce with his dicky heart and failed kidneys, Jason with a dodgy heart and bad legs, the other Sheila with her back, not to mention Sheila, my brother in hospital and Sue, a friend of Sheila's, also in hospital.

Physical jerks seem to be in vogue this week. Well, not physical jerks but physiotherapy. Graham has started his following his hip replacement. Sue's problem is quite a story. She lost the use of her legs on Christmas Day but they recovered. It happened again at 5am on Monday last week when she went to the loo and she lay on the floor for three hours until her 92-year-old father found her. Taken off to hospital in Brighton she was later transferred to the neurological hospital at Haywards Heath where they operated on Saturday to remove a tumour from her neck which had been pressing on her spinal cord. Apparently she has now started physiotherapy. Sheila also had a physio session this morning, the first for about a month, the last session having been cancelled when her physio was sick (for the second time in three months). Let's hope it won't be too long before they're all capable of doing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown' again.

Maybe The Yellow Rose of Texas will appear tomorrow.
But then again, maybe not. I'm still waiting for Skip's sick parrot joke.