Wilf: How Carmina’s ‘Biryani’ struck a chord with me

Jun 27 2009 By Wilf Lunn

BECAUSE both my parents were deaf, as a young child music was a stranger to me.

The only songs I knew were Grannie Annie’s ...

Who’s this coming down the street

Mrs Simpson ain’t she sweet.

She’s been married seven times before

Now she’s knocking on Edward’s door.

and Aunt Ethel’s ‘Daisy Daisy give your answer do’. I couldn’t even whistle.

At school of course we had hymns in assembly but we didn’t have music lesson till we were in the upper half of Longroyd Junior School.

I wasn’t very fond of these lessons. I always ended up with a triangle although the school had loads of different percussion instruments.

The triangles were not the great big one I’d seen in the ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ film which Gabby Hayes used to summon the cowboys to the chuck waggon.

The castanets we had were tied to a stick unlike the pair macho Spanish dancers had in each hand and the class were only given one each. It was like rattling Grannie’s false teeth on a stick. I was always on a triangle which involved a lot of counting bars. I longed to be on the drum or tambourine or even the castanet but it was not to be.

Despite all this I do love music and when I was asked to go with my son Richard to buy his mother a recording for Christmas I readily agreed.