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I like to listen to the radio on Saturday mornings, even the ironing is more tolerable if I have Radio 4 to distract me. I find it a bit dangerous to listen to one of the morning programmes because the presenter is so irritating that it is a triumph of willpower to resist flinging the radio through the window. I think the words smug, patronising and supercilious sum her up fairly adequately, but perhaps I am just being critical. Saturday’s are not the same since the demise of John Peel and his programme Home Truths, it is a while since he died, but I still miss him, he was a legend. The new programme has a feature called inheritance tracks where a person is asked to choose two pieces of music, one that they inherited from their parents and one that they would like to pass on to the next generation. I have to admit that it is a nice idea, it set me thinking about what I would choose.

There was plenty to choose from and I found it hard to make my mind up. The first pop song that I remember taking notice of was She Loves You by the Beatles. I had a tiny little plastic guitar that I pretended to play, but oddly I always said I wanted to be Ringo, I don’t think I had noticed that he was a drummer, I just liked the sound of his name, I was just a toddler. Another contender for a song that I inherited was Dear Old Donegal, I have no idea who sang that, but my mum used to sing all the time (she could sing quite nicely) and when we were driving around in the car my brother used to ask her to sing this song over and over again.

The two previous songs bring back happy memories, but I think my choice of inherited song would be I Believe, I think it was sung by Frankie Laine. When I was a very young child my parents had a big Chrysler car, it was sort of American looking and it had a bench seat at the front. It was long before the days of seat belts and I remember sitting at the side of my dad and listening to him sing the first couple of lines of that song as he drove along. Perhaps singing is overstating it, he was as tuneless as a bullfrog (that’s where I get it from), but I have carried those words with me through life – I believe for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows. As it turned out quite a few drops of rain have fallen in my life. so the hope of ‘flowers growing’ helped a lot.

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The song that I would like to pass on to my children is more difficult, I’m not really that interested in music and my personal favourite song The Killing of Georgie by Rod Stewart is hardly appropriate. When the children were younger my husband always played CD’s or tapes in the car. I remember my daughter being very small and requesting the ‘Melton John’ music. We used to listen to the Bee Gee’s a lot too, and if I was choosing a personal favourite from their music it would be I started a Joke. However this has to be something to pass on so that will not do. I think I would settle for an Eva Cassidy song because we all loved listening to her music. I love Fields of Gold, but it is so sad and haunting, somehow I feel that my choice should be more uplifting, so I would choose Eva Cassidy’s version of Somewhere Over The Rainbow, I think it is beautiful.

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