Pancakes tomorrow…

It turns out Warminster has its very own pancake song:

Dame, is your pan hot?
Lard and corn is dear;
I’ve come a-shovin’,
Tis but once a year.
So up to the flitch
and cut a gurt stitch;
If your hens don’t lay,
I’ll steal your cock away
Afore next Shrove Tuesday.

Though obviously with all that talk of shoving and cocks, I think it’s probably about repairing your central heating system.

2 thoughts on “Pancakes tomorrow…

  1. I think that you have been given a mistranslation – everybody knows that folk rhymes have an AABBCC.. rhyming scheme whereas your’s seem to have ABCBDDEEE, which is just so blatantly wrong. I think the proper version is:

    Dame, is your pan hot?
    Your countenance suggests not;
    I’ve come a-shovin’,
    At this time of lovin’,
    Tis but once a year.

    So up to the flitch
    and cut a gurt stitch;
    If your hens don’t lay,
    I’ll steal your cock away
    ‘Fore next Shrove Tuesday’s here.

    Obviously it is about an itinerant coal man – “shovin'” being a contraction of shovelling, “time of lovin'” being a technical term for the fallow part of the year when no mining would be done for fear of kobolds and so coalmen would roam the land looking for any gainful employment. If she does not pay him for his trouble by darning his socks and some hard-boiled eggs, he wlll render her plumbing useless – this much has been preserved in your sanitised version – although given the primitive state it is in, she will only notice it in about a year, most probably when the cess pit begins to leak into the water table.

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