WO'N -
I thanked you privately for supplying me the lead to eMule, but here's the public acknowledgement.
This thread has wandered into cows, kites and giraffes, so I'll provide the text I was originally searching, and hope it generates some appreciation for Sir A.P.
Thanks again.

>From Soma, on the mule list:
(With many thanks from AJC for the answer to his request for the text
of one of his favorite light poems)
Author is A.P. Herbert

"Great fun, this stuff:- "

'Twas at the pictures, child, we met,
Your father and your mother;
The drama's name I now forget,
But it was like another.

The Viscount had too much to drink,
And so his plot miscarried,
And at the end I rather think
Two citizens were married.

But at the opening of the play
By Fortune's wise design--
It was an accident, I say--
A little hand met mine.

My fingers round that little hand
Unconsciously were twisted;
I do not say that it was planned,
But it was not resisted.

I held the hand. The hand was hot.
I could not see her face;
But in the dark I gazed at what
I took to be the place.

From shock to shock, from sin to sin
The fatal film proceeded;
I cannot say I drank it in,
I rather doubt if she did.

In vain did pure domestics flout
The base but high-born brute;
Their honour might be up the spout,
We did not care a hoot.

For, while those clammy palms we clutched,
By stealthy slow degrees
We moved an inch or two and touched
Each other with our knees.

No poet makes a special point
Of any human knee,
But in that plain prosaic joint
Was high romance for me.

Thus hand in hand and toe to toe,
Reel after reel we sat;
You are not old enough to know
The ecstasy of that.

A touch of cramp about the shins
Was all that troubled me;
Your mother tells me she had pins
And needles in the knee.

But our twin spirits rose above
Mere bodily distress;
And if you ask me "Is this Love?"
The answer, child, is "Yes."

And when the film was finished quite
It made my bosom swell
To find that by electric light
I loved her just as well.

For women, son, are seldom quite
As worthy of remark
Beneath a strong electric light
As they are in the dark.

But this was not the present case,
And it was joy to see
A form as fetching and a face
Magnetic as her knee.

And still twice weekly we enjoy
The pictures, grave and gross;
We don't hold hands so much, my boy,
Our knees are not so close;

But now and then, for Auld Lang Syne,
Or frenzied by the play,
Your mother slips her hand in mine,
To my intense dismay,

And then, though at my time of life
It seems a trifle odd
I move my knee and give my wife
A sentimental prod.

Well, such is Love and such is Fate,
And such is Marriage too;
And such will happen, soon or late,
Unhappy youth, to you.

And, though most learned men have strained
To work the matter out,
No mortal man has yet explained
What it is all about.

And I don't know why mortals try
But if with vulgar chaff
You hear some Philistine decry
The cinematograph,

Think then, my son, on your papa,
And take the kindly view,
For had there been no cinema
There might have been no you.