What do you do when you have a habit of keeping almost every scrap of paper that either someone wrote something on or drew a silly picture on? Eventually you have no choice but to sift through that paper and determine what stays and what goes.

As a parent, I was duty bound to keep a lot of Reuben’s pictures. Some were merely because they were cute and reminded me of simpler times, others were because they were downright weird and prompted referring to a psychiatrist for confirmation as to whether it was time to call the men in white coats. Shame you can’t call it a looney bin anymore because it’s not politically correct. It’s not a real bin full of loonies, how would anyone ever confuse a large building full of crazy people with a bin? Silly. I suppose looney building doesn’t have the same ring to it. “I’m going to put you in a looney office,”

Mixed in with some frightening scribbles of monsters ripping people in two and an invention of mine called the ‘Scuba Umbrella’, I found some hand-written lyrics for two of the Papples most played / most requested / best loved songs of all times: ‘Mincey Beef’ and ‘(Do it)’, the latter of which is a lot harder to type at 11pm at night.

Does it offer an insight into the collective minds at work? Does it share the rare genius hammering out the hits during a prolific time in their career? Not really. The top left-hand corner reveals what I think I was trying to crowbar into the song: mince, beef (obviously), nen tosh, Shergar (?), Aberdeen angus and no neddy beef. The rest is pretty much the lyrics of the song verbatim with the odd tweak here and there, no doubt as a result of hours of sweat and toil in the recording studio working out the best arrangement.

Let us not forget the immortal words: “Beef is back, meat attack.”

‘(Do it)’ is less interesting because there was only two strips of lyrics and nothing on the back. These were probably used as the starting blocks of the songs because they were transferred to somewhere more permanent, a larger piece of paper or a notebook, or maybe even a word document. It’s hard to remember the long ago times as we all know.