Humming to myself in the shower this morning (as you do), I was mentally going over the tunes we'd been playing recently in between dances at a series of ceilidh gigs. "La Grande Chaine" sprung to mind and I suddenly started singing "The good ship sails in the alley alley-oh, the alley alley-oh" - which was all I could remember. This was a song that my sister used to sing in the playground - ooh - 50 years or so ago. I then hummed the "A" part of "La Grande Chaine to She Who Must Be Obeyed, and she immediately thought of "the good ship".

"La Grande Chaine is a French-Canadian tune - so I'm wondering: is it pure coincidence that the two tunes are so similar (there are, after all, only 13 notes in the scale) - or is there some link between the two? I don't have an Opie book to hand to check the origins of the playground song.

And if anyone has the whole words to "the good ship", SWMBO would be interested as she's forgotten the words... :-)