Here’s a joke I learned when I was a child:
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Maybe it’s a big ‘orse
Maybe it’s a big ‘orse who?
(sings) Maybe itsabigorse I’m a Londoner that I love London town
Countless Londoners have wandered home as drunk as newts over the years singing Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner. The song was already so old and so ubiquitous thirty years ago that I have always assumed that it dated back to the early decades of the 20th century and perhaps even the 19th. So I was quite shocked to read on An Englishman’s Castle that the composer, Hubert Gregg, passed away just yesterday.
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
That I love London so
Well, maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
That I think of her wherever I go
I get a funny feeling inside of me
While walking up and down
Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner
That I love London town
Another Londoner passed away this morning: my grandmother. She was a servant girl in the Upstairs Downstairs era of the 1920s and raised my mother and uncle in Battersea during the blitz. I didn’t see her much over the past two decades because I fell for a well-known scam when I was 18 and ended up getting shipped off to America. Ooops! I’m better now though, but I do miss my home.
