Speaking of Lancashire heritage etc., I was at Cliveden (the Bucks mansion where the Profumo/Christine Keller shennanigans occurred many years back) the other day having a nice salad in the orangery and watching all the beautiful children running around, when I heard a lady at a nearby table singing to her fractious grandchild. She had a distinct Lancs accent and the little rhyme she was singing, complete with gestures, went: 'wind the bobbin up, wind the bobbin up, pull, pull, clap, clap, clap.'
It fascinated me because of course no-one in Lancs has wound a bobbin up in decades, and it occurred to me that this little song must have been handed down through several generations, sung by millworker parents, to their tots, whose only expectation in life was that they too might one day be winding a bobbin up. It made me feel inexplicably sad. However, the little chap to whom she was singing was cheered up no end, and he loved winding up his own invisible bobbin. Unlike me, he was soon chuckling.