Incidentally, the Cat and the Fiddle near me is a marvellous if tiny pub - smaller than my bedroom and filled inside and outside with bikers. It's on the Cat and Fiddle Pass - the most dangerous road in Britain.
But still a marvellous pub
Hookbill - that's an interesting link, I hadn't thought of that. But I think in this case, that may actually just be coincidence - it's like the saying along variations of 'making a racket fit to raise the dead'. But that could lead to a chicken-or-egg question of whether that saying came first or whether it was picked up from the poem...
