This morning, for some reason or another I suddenly remembered a song I used to listen to a lot, about two years ago. But “remembered” might not be the right word, ‘cause all I really remembered were the lyrics. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the title was and who wrote and / or performed the song. Now, this in itself is not a huge problem. The Internet makes these kind of small problems incredibly easy to solve. So I “googled” the part of the lyrics that I could still remember (some stuff about Winnie the Pooh) and quickly found the song “House At Pooh Corner”.

But wait a minute…

I didn’t remember this to be a Kenny Loggins song. And I had never even heard of this title “House At Pooh Corner”. The lyrics were right though, that much was obvious. A strange situation. I continued to download the Kenny Loggins song and when I did, it turned out to be the right song. The song I had been thinking of. However, it was a completely different version than the one I remembered. And, as said before, the title was “wrong”. Now what?

Well, the logical explanation would be that someone covered the song and that I had been listening to a different version of it. However that still didn’t explain the fact that I didn’t recognize the title, at all. I downloaded every version of “House At Pooh Corner” that I could get my hands on. The one by Kenny Loggins, one by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, A Loggins & Messina version, an Indigo Girls version, Amy Grant & Kenny Loggins, etc. A friend helped me out by suggesting all these versions but none of these turned out to be “my version”. I vaguely remembered listening to another song a lot in that period called “Streets of London”. I could recall that this was a Cat Stevens song, or at least a cover of someone else’s song by Cat Stevens. This led me to believe that perhaps the song I was looking for was a Cat Stevens version of “House At Pooh Corner”. It was entirely possible that I had picked up this song during my 2004 Cat Stevens period. It stuck with me.. Cat Stevens, it somehow has something to do with Cat Stevens. So I went through my modest collection of Cat Stevens records but couldn’t find the song. I googled it, searched on limewire but all to no avail.

I decided to bring out the big guns: my mum. Hey, don’t laugh! This is music from her time, she might know. Anyways, by now the morning had long gone and the afternoon was well underway. I was just about ready to try anything. So I gave her a ring ’cause I know she’s always up for this kind of fun. For some reason her thoughts went directly to Melanie. Melanie (Safka) a musician from the same period as Cat Stevens. She performed songs like “Beautiful People”, “Ruby Tuesday” and “The Nickel Song”. And behold! Another one of her songs is called “Christopher Robin”. Christopher Robin is the little boy that hangs out with Winnie the Pooh (or something, I’m not very familiar with the whole Winnie The Pooh cartoon and have no particular desire to be) and the lyrics of the song “House At Pooh Corner” referred to Christopher Robin as well as Winnie the Pooh. Needless to say we were finally getting somewhere. Or so I thought. My mum could however remember this song and knew right away this wasn’t it. Christopher Robin was going to lead us in the right direction though. I googled it and finally found a song on limewire called “Christopher Robin” by, believe it or not, Cat Stevens. By now I couldn’t sit straight in my chair, I downloaded the song and it turned out to be the song I had been looking for all morning and part of the afternoon. The correct version. A version of “House At Pooh Corner” but somehow with a different name and performed by Cat Stevens.

However, by now I had been up and down the entire World Wide web about 17 times and had found almost nothing that would prove that Cat Stevens did indeed record a cover of “House At Pooh Corner”, let alone under a different title. It just didn’t seem right. I found some evidence suggesting that the version of the song I was listening to wasn’t Cat Stevens at all. And to be honest both mum and me weren’t so sure we recognized Cat Stevens’ voice in this song.    There was more evidence to be found. A website in German and one in English offered the song “Christopher Robin” by Cat Stevens for download. I downloaded it and it was indeed “my version” of the song. And, on the official Cat Stevens website I even found a fan proclaiming that “Christopher Robin” was his favorite Cat Stevens song. Finally some prove arrived supporting the general notion that I am not suffering from some mental illness. On the official Cat Stevens website I found a forum thread about “Christopher Robin”. In this thread a guy by the nickname of “idlehero” explains how he downloaded a song called “Christopher Robin”, supposedly by Cat Stevens. He then goes on to explain how he found out that it is originally a Kenny Loggins song and how he downloaded many different version and finally ended up on the Cat Stevens website only to find out that Cat Stevens never recorded a song by that name or recorded a cover of “House At Pooh Corner”. So basically, it turns out, I am not the only nutter strolling around the Internet, looking for an answer to this small but intriguing little problem. That thought, I tell you, is very soothing to me. I am, however, still left with the problem of not knowing who it actually is that sings this song. I mean, its easy to understand where things went wrong; some kid downloaded a song to his computer, listened to it and somehow the title of the track changed from “House At Pooh Corner” to “Christopher Robin”. He didn’t know the real title and thus called it what he guessed it would be. “Christopher Robin”. This whole process is understandable, what with filesharing and downloading, etc. I can even sleep at night thinking that someone made the mistake of guessing that this was Cat Stevens voice he heard, and so accredited this version to Stevens, but what keeps me up at night is the not knowing who it is that performs this particular version of the song. I need someone, anyone to help me sleep!