A Geordie Tale!

All this tahk aboot the north East reminds me of the time when I was stationed in Trincomalee in the north east part of the (then) island of Ceylon. We had a couple of North Easterners in our mess. Both we called Jordies, I suppose, because of their North Eastern lingo although we had to admit that Middlesborough was not Geordie, but Yorkshire. One was from Middlesborough and one from Sooth Sheels (Is that in Yorkshire or Co. Durham - Geordie-land to us Southerners)
One of them (from Sooth Sheels, taught me the Winkle Song which I used to sing ad infinitum at all our Southern Music Nights as it was vaguely ‘Cockney’
When I was in the Sandown Amateur Musical Society, I opened my act with “Tonight my partner and I had planned to sing The Famous Duet from Bizet’s “The Pearl Fishers”. Pleasant applause from the audience, Then I had to apologise as my partner was sick and had not turned up (Sad OOOOOOHs) but as my wife had just written an Opera Called The Winkle Pickers, I would sing the opening chorus, and started to sing my Winkle Song mainly to the tune of “Knees-up Mother Brown”, or thereabouts. Delighted cheers from the audience!! Oh happy days.
Reading of the town of Yarm reminded me of one of our Geordies who wrote to the local Geordie weekly press asking for pen-pals for a group of love torn sailors in the Far East who wanted news from home. We didn’t mention that we were a sex starved group of lads in the Flag Officer Far East’s staff and had never been to sea, except our journey on one aircraft carrier from Tilbury to Colombo. A number of Geordie lasses answered our plea and when these letters were dished out mine was from a pretty girl in Yarm Lane somewhere. Foreign territory to me - where the hell is Yarm ? From the picture on our blog it looks just like Thame, where I spent many years in Lloyds Bank.