"Let's sing!"

No, I will not be singing over the Budget. It was much as I expected. Almost everyone I know will be pulling their belts a notch tighter. 

But there is an article in today's paper about singing in school...or rather, the lack of it. Apparently you don't sing in school any more. I don't know where the class singing and the choirs and school assembly songs have gone. There must surely be some of it? 

I thought back to my kittenhood. I remember music back then. I hated, loathed and detested my experience of "kindergarten" but I do remember sitting on the floor and singing songs about rabbits, spiders, lambs, mice, spiders and kookaburras...and more.  An adult played the piano and we sang.  I don't think we were actually taught these songs. We knew them. We "picked them up" as we went along. 

We sang some of the same songs in school and we were taught others. We had regular music lessons. We learned "tonic sulfur" as we called it and the beginnings of reading music. There were "song books" and other songs were added to them. School assembly was a weekly event where we sang the national anthem and more. (We also saluted the flag and vowed to be good citizens.)

In the later years of primary school we listened to a weekly broadcast out in the bush and Mum (the only other teacher in the school) taught children to play descant recorders. The noise was not good but at least children were learning something about music. A few children had piano or other lessons. Mum was the one who started my siblings off on that path.

When I reached the first year of secondary school music became a real "thing" in school. We had a maths teacher who was very musical and very able. Television was only a few years old in our part of the world and Mr M.... appeared on there at regular intervals playing his guitar and singing. People would laugh now. It was black and white television of course. The cameras were still cameras and the back drop was nothing more than a plain curtain. Nevertheless it was our Mr M... who was appearing. 

J... as I later called him went on to teach at one of the major choir schools in Upover. (We took on his cat and I still use the base of the bed he left behind.) He taught us to sing, really sing.

We had a school song book. He put it together with the Senior Cat and input from other members of staff. I spent a week of the summer holidays before my first year of secondary school turning the handle of the old Gestetner printer producing copies for everyone. In it there was everything from German folk songs (sung in both languages thank you) to campfire songs like "The Quartermaster's Store".  We learned "Gaudeamus Igitur" along with the school anthem and Christmas carols.  

The kittens in this street know none of those things. I know they do not sing at school. They are active out door children at home. That's a good thing too but they are surely missing something?

My old campfire book, from my Guiding days, is something I have kept. I have a friend from that time, my only friend from the time we sat around the campfire at the old camps for disabled children. O... would get out her guitar and say, "Let's sing!" We sang. It was so much fun. They can't do that any more.