The last Punch & Judy man I shared a yurt with had characters such as Pappa-Rotti, the flatulent Italian tenor, and, if I remember rightly, PC Barf the vomiting policeman. The whole show was a bawdy extravaganza that occasional nudged the obscene, but which nevertheless had the family audience rolling off their hay bales, thus causing in the poor storyteller much consternation as to what he might come up with to follow it!

This was back in the heady days of 1995, at the Allansford Country Fair where the picturesque River Derwent still forms the ancient border between Country Durham and Northumberland. It was here, according to Robert Graves in The White Goddess, that the celebrated 17th century witch Isobel Gowdie had one of her covens - Grave's expansion of Gowdie's famous shape-shifting incantation I shall go into a hare... is called The Allansford Pursuit.

Rising to the challenge of the P&J man, I sang this as part of that visceral old chestnut about Jack the Poacher catching a hare whilst a constipated gamekeeper dumps his load behind a hedge. Not sure if Mudcat is quite the place for a full exposition of this story, but I do have a complete transcript of me telling it some years back - PM me if you're interested!

Anyhoo, they loved the poacher story - even the P&J man was impressed with that (one shudders to think how he might have incorporated it into his act), but one couple objected to the witchcraft, no matter how historical the witchcraft might have been. They also objected to the predatory nature of the song, wherein a hound chases a hare, a swallow chases a bee, an otter chases a trout and (horror of horrors!) a cat chases a mouse. They made their complaint (as they said they would) to the relevant party who contacted me forthwith, pointing out that it was all right because they were Jehovah's Witnesses.   

I remember doing school in Sunderland once where I was assigned two Jehovah's Witness kids to show me the ropes as it were. The head pointed out that she'd done this because, whilst in all probability my stories wouldn't be suitable for them to listen to, she wanted to involve them in my my visit. When I enquired how my stories wouldn't be suitable, she said they weren't allowed to hear anything that involved the supernatural. By the time it came to tell to their class, we were such good mates that I made sure none of my stories involved the supernatural in any shape or form, choosing those good old Asbjorsen & Moe domestics like The Man Who Kept House and The Axe Handle, with Lazy Jack and Don Niperi Septo thrown in for good measure, though I might have slipped up with a talking frog at one point...

Daftnesses? At times I might wonder...