I suddenly stopped what I was doing and thought, “Is this normal? Does anyone else do this?” I was grafting the last sliver of a bar of soap onto a new bar so as not to waste any. Like so.

I’ve been doing it all my life, just the way I was shown by my mum. Now, as a working class family in Birmingham we weren’t rich but Mum and Dad worked hard to feed and clothe us and pay the rent. They were used to being thrifty, looking for bargains, cheap cuts of meat, squeezing the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. But soap grafts? I’ve never known anyone else do it. Do you?

Hold on though, there was something else.

This is a cricket jumper. When you are little your jumpers get too small don’t they? And your mum buys you a bigger one. Oh no, not my mum. As I grew she’d buy a ball or two of white wool and knit an extension. Then another, then a third. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to me to have differing shades of white on the bottom of my jumper with the original stripe (yellow/black in the above example) up around my chest somewhere. The sleeves must have got the same attention. I wondered by the other boys used to giggle.

Did I have the worst mum in the world or are these things quite normal?

A man may whistle and a man may sing
A man can do a thousand things
But a whistling woman and a crowing hen
May bring the Devil out of his den
Maxine Peake

When was the last time a man in a hat walked down your street whistling a merry tune? No, nor me. In fact, was there ever a time when people really whistled? I mean, whistled casually rather than as an entertainment? Maybe that image was more in the imagination – or absorbed from mid-century Hollywood or Elstree Studios films.

However, Charles Dickens in Pickwick Papers recounted “To the great horror of Mr John Smauker, Sam Weller began to whistle. ‘I beg your pardon Mr Weller’ said Mr John Smauker, agonised at the exceedingly ungenteel sound.”

Indeed, the stereotype I have in mind is of a cheery butcher’s boy or newspaper boy out on delivery, and of more genteel boys being warned not to lower their standards to such levels.

---

And those piercing whistles with the aid of fingers in the mouth? I used to have a friend who could split stones at a dozen paces with one of those.

And those wolf whistles – now generally frowned upon – aimed by workmen at a cutie walking by. Said cutie was supposed to smile, perhaps wave, or she’d be subject to rather less complimentary comments.

---

Whistling is actually a traditional language in La Gomera, one of the smaller Canary Islands, so much so that it is studied in schools to keep the language alive.

---

Did soldiers whistle? John Keegan Casey (1846 – 70) appears to think so in The Rising of the Moon commemorating the 1798 Irish uprising.

One more word for signal token, whistle up the marching tune
With your pike upon your shoulder at the rising of the moon.

Colonel Bogey and When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again also suggest a tradition when soldiers might have whistled a marching tune if unsure of the words.

---

Whistling has a long history in music hall and vaudeville. Here in Jersey a lady called Doreen Le Maistre did a ‘Whistle and Saw’ act during the Occupation. Ronnie Ronalde was a rather more famous star with yodelling and bird imitation among his other talents.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) gave us Whistle While You Work which went on to epitomise the British war effort a few years later.

---

There are many examples in popular music. Perhaps Otis Redding’s Sitting on the Dock of the Bay has one of the more memorable whistling passages.

But to conclude I give you Whistling Jack Smith aka Billy Moeller aka actor Coby Wells who was a Jersey resident for a while in the late 1970s and who was no mean cricketer who I played against on several occasions. He was the public face of the hit I was Kaiser Bill’s Batman – here is Billy.

‘Where do you all come from?’ – Mott The Hoople

One of WordPress’s most interesting stats is ‘hits by country’. In an idle moment I checked out my hits for the last year. In percentage terms here they are –

United States          23.8
United Kingdom      19.6
Jersey                     19.3
Ireland                     17.6
Canada                     6.1
Australia                   3.2
France                      1.2
New Zealand            1.2
Brazil                        0.8
Germany                  0.7
Guernsey                 0.7
Other                        5.8

In some instances surprising. The US is a big-ass country (as Britt would say) but I wonder if it has a higher percentage of bloggers. A lot of hits from my home island but I have no idea who they might be from as they are happy to lurk, which is fine. UK and Ireland I’d expect to be up there.

But hello out there in Brazil and Germany – and especially in Guernsey, our neighbours Who Time Forgot 😉

Any surprising numbers from fellow bloggers out there?

I feel like I’ve finally joined the ranks of ‘proper’ indie authors. My 2010 running novel Barry has made its bow onto the  (very crowded) worldwide  stage. Last night it appeared on Amazon Kindle and it is now available to purchase and download.

I took the easy peasy route. First of all I didn’t have direct access to the final text  file. I was therefore unable to go the self-conversion road and battle my way through the process of uploading a clean mobi file. In any case have read too many stories about the difficulties involved (though I believe these are becoming fewer day by day). I’ve little patience with technical matters anyway.

So I did what I’ve always done when faced with a task out of my comfort zone – I paid a little man to do it. And for £125, though expensive enough, I had a perfect and painless mobi file and even I managed to complete the KDP publication process from there.

Midsummer and Tess ought to follow shortly but for now, if you fancy an entertaining read, based around running but moving into areas that surprised even me, go to the Barry – The Novel tab above.