I did it My Way...

The song My Way has always had a presence in my life.
You see, my dad was Frank Sinatra.

Since time remembered there was always music playing in our house, usually the radio, always the BBC Light programme on which the crooners of yesteryear were mixed with the new upstarts of popular music such as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones - but every now and again a Frank Sinatra song would pop up on the radio and the infant Jerrychicken would recognise the song and the voice as that of his dad.

The same dad who was coincidently also called Frank, would take to the stage at Wallis's Holiday Camp in Cayton Bay every year and sing a Sinatra song to the gathered and captive audience of holiday makers, hence the link in the young Jerrychicken mind, to me the voice on the radio was singing the same song as my dad with the same phrase-iology (newly invented word) and he was called Frank - it was good enough for me.

As the infant grew to a youth and the household aquired a second hand radiogram, the songs of Frank Sinatra dominated and if that wasn't enough, Sinatra was heard singing from the bathroom every morning as he went about his ablutions.

And then one saturday evening after a night down the pub, Ned came home with a record that he'd borrowed from a gullible friend of his, a gullible friend who had been taken in by the newly invented punk revolution, a friend who had just that very day purchased Sid Vicious murdering the song "My Way".

We thought it was great and we sat and waited until our dad came home from the Con Club where he had been boozing the night away and crooning to his appreciative drunken audience. He sat down in his favourite chair, bubbles and pink elephants flying around his head, opened up the customary after-pub saturday night bar of Old Jamaca chocolate, and flicked the tv channel over to Parkinson.

"Put some music on instead Ned" I suggested
"Aye put some music on instead Ned" our beer sodden father suggested
"Put My Way on Ned" I suggested
"Aye, put My Way on Ned" our beer sodden father suggested

And so he did.
The version that you see above.

I'll leave you to imagine the reaction.