Cap't Bob.

Thanks for that, I am reassured. If I had any doubts, they are now gone as I can't really imagine Robert Maxwell coming up with songs as good as those above. (Maybe 'Walking Away With The Money Talking Blues')?

I have just had another hornpipe roll off the production line and if you are agreeable, I would like to call it Cap't Bob's Hornpipe, in your honour, not his?

I would like to go back to something you said earlier, about whether the world needed another hornpipe. It is something I have touched on here before. It was in conversation with a melody player at a session, when I mentioned that the tune I had just played was an original one. He said words to the effect that, "there are enough good tunes already".

It is strange to hear this, as I have not heard the same said about songs or poems, or anything else?

I have developed this theory that to a melody player an unknown tune is a challenge, a bit like an un-climbed mountain to a climber. Every time you produce a new tune, it's like producing a new mountain to conquer and there are only so many mountains you can climb and only so many tunes you can learn.

We all need to live in houses but some of us like build them too.

Even with your 200 essential Irish tunes (which there are books and there was a thread here on the same subject) there would still be tunes you did not know, or like me, ones you did not recognise until they were over. All part of the fun, I think.

You also have the problem of 200 tunes and at least 300 titles for them.