Food web and a tenuous thread

To be fair, the Daddy-long-legs spider is very much a bit part player in today's blogpost. It has been hanging around by the fruit bowl for a few days now, presumably in the forlorn hope that some fruit flies might be attracted to the over-ripe bananas. Whilst this room is never particularly warm, the spider seems oblivious of the fact that there's not going to be any flying insects around for a while. I can't bring myself to break the bad news to it. Or maybe the spider just fancied a change from all those corners of ceilings?

However, Megan had remarked that irrespective of whether there were fruit flies or not, I hadn't snarfed the bananas. This was true, my fruit intake having waned this week, which I can only put down to all the gales and horizontal rain having an affect on my appetite, leaving me to hanker after more hearty, comforting food.

This morning, at the supermarket, there wasn't a fresh banana to be seen on the shelves, presumably due to the afore-mentioned bad weather disrupting the shipment of freight across the Pentland Firth. As we wandered on by, the couple behind us did a double take and I heard the chap say "Yes, we have no bananas."

As the song popped into my head, I gave him a broad grin... and only then realised that the version I was singing to myself wasn't in English.

 
So here we are, not the 1922 original sung by Eddie Cantor in the Broadway revue 'Make it Snappy', but another version of the Frank Silver and Irving Cohn song, "Ja! Wir haben keine Bananen" with Volker Rosin.

Honestly, three and half years with the British Army of the Rhine back in the 1980s and this is all I have to show for it 🤦‍♂️

One of the more curious snippets which was unearthed during what passes for research around here was that the original song was the theme of the outdoor relief protests in Belfast in 1932, a unique example of Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland protesting together. It seems that the tune was one of the few non-sectarian songs that both communities knew. That may be the least depressing thing I have heard about the Depression.