I HATE to mention the singer Taylor Swift and a foghorn in the same sentence, but no disrespect is intended. I know little about Swift, except that she seems smart and is certainly successful.

Her voice, from what I’ve heard of it, is pleasant enough, so why bring up the foghorn? I blame BBC Radio 4’s Today progamme. This morning there were two separate items in which sound was a theme. There was no connection as such, other than the fun to be had in spotting a possible link for these fleeting thoughts.

Swift is in the news for taking a stand against Apple, which will now pay royalties to artists during a three-month trial for its new music service, Apple Music. The singer is credited with being the tipping point in a row between independent labels and musicians and the mighty Apple. In a blog post titled To Apple, Love Taylor, she called on the company to drop its plans not to pay artists during the trial period. A man called Eddy Cue, who is Apple’s senior vice president for internet software and services (bet that doesn’t fit on a name badge at conferences) announced the U-turn on Twitter, saying that Apple would always make sure artists were paid, adding “We hear you Taylor Swift”.

Well, good on Taylor Swift. It’s good to see a superstar singer using her muscle to support others in her industry. She probably doesn’t need the money herself, but it is important that artistic people should be paid for what they produce. It’s never been easy for people who create things to earn a living from their art, and it’s even harder nowadays in this internet world. To mangle an old lyric from Dire Straits, now it’s: “Nothing for money and your kicks for free.”

After the trial period, users of Apple’s new service will pay a monthly fee to listen to streamed music. Now I have jumbled-up feelings about this, streaming being one of those modern things I haven’t got around to doing yet. I can’t see myself wishing to pay for that, when all I have to do is pull a CD from the shelf.

Yet it is thanks to Apple and my now-ancient iPod that I could listen to the Rolling Stones while out jogging (yesterday’s Man On Ledge) and can listen to music in our old Volvo, through a mock-cassette thingey that links to the iPod. And being able to cart so much music around in such a small device is certainly a marvel.

As for the foghorn, Hawsker Bull used to send out its mournful bellow from the Whitby foghorn station, but has been silent since the 1980s. The Today programme resurrected that sound this morning (forgivable as it was time to get up) in a report on a new National Trust initiative to record the sounds of the seaside to be stored in an audio archive.

What a great idea, as the seaside has so many sounds, from the gulls to the sound of the sea itself; from the wind in the riggings to the noise of a port, and so on. And then there was that scream. The one on a beach in Jersey, when a seagull swooped and stole an un-licked ice-cream cone from a woman’s hand, leaving her to cry out in shock and amusement.

Today people are so obsessed with taking pictures of everything from what they’ve just eaten onwards that it’s good to consider storing aural memories too.

The seaside noises will form an archive, and some of sounds submitted by the public will be used by Martyn Ware, a founder member of The Human League, to create a piece of music for release next February.

And Taylor Swift won’t be anywhere near it, I guess.

I WENT running with Mick and Keith this morning. First time I’ve done that in a while. It was debateable who might stumble first, and Keith certainly looked dodgy at one point, but then he often does.

There has to be music when I run, and today it was The Rolling Stones, the compilation Jump Back, covering the years from 1971 to 1993.

The Stones seem to have been with us for ever. That’s because they have, more or less. It’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t around, faintly ridiculous, totally marvellous, burnishing rock clichés until they glister under the sun.

I’m not exactly a full-on fan, but you can’t beat a blast of the Stones sometimes. So I ran with Start Me Up, Brown Sugar, Harlem Shuffle, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll (But I Like It) through to Waiting On A Friend and Wild Horses. But the time that last one came around, I could have done with one of those to drag me home.

I saw them once, ages ago, at Wembley Stadium. A skim of the Google pond brings up the tadpole fact that it was probably in 1982, although I couldn’t say for sure. The band seemed miles away, tiny rock Subbuteo figures, rolling around in front of a large screen on which their mammoth selves were projected.

Debates about whether one band is better than another belong in the distant past, and to a mop-haired student of my acquaintance who used to lead earnest discussions on why no one should listen to Genesis. Well, it was a long time ago and I can’t even recall the reason now. Sometimes people used to have the Beatles versus the Stones argument. My only contribution to that is to observe that the Stones were generally more fun, and they were certainly the ones with staying power.

Last Sunday was father’s day, in that we had my father over for a belated 83^rd birthday party. Today is Father’s Day more generally. I am a father in between: my father above me, three more or less grown-up children below.

Our three are down in the kitchen as I type. On Friday, the younger two turned up as a surprise, one from university in Newcastle, the other from Salford (working, playing in a band called Sonic Bliss Machine) as they thought I needed a lift. The eldest, who lives in York, has just come round to help cook lunch: homemade burgers and home-baked buns. I should have suggested Daddies Sauce to go with the burgers, but only just thought of that. I’ll just have to add a bit of sauciness of my own, an old recipe. Crumble in an obvious remark or two, sprinkle over a corny remark, and then mix it all together, adding vinegar and salt to taste.

‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…’

Unlike poor John Keats, dead at 25, it is my head that aches a little, as though of one pint more than usual I had drunk. Last night there was another leaving do. This one took place at the Golden Ball, the community co-operative pub in Bishophill in York. This lovely Victorian pub is now owned and run by the locals, and what a top place it is.

The occasion was a farewell for two members of the National Union of Journalists, Tony Kelly and me. I have been a member since starting out, although with a gap in the middle for a few years, and with occasional ideological wobbles and differences. For now I am still paying the subs, but that may change, depending on what happens next.

What, if any, alternative union would suit me now? The National Union of Displaced Workers, perhaps. The National Union Of This That And A Bit Of The Other might do it. Or maybe the National Union of the As Yet Unknown.

Maybe I could form my own association, the National Union of Men Standing on Ledges. Women standing on ledges would of course be free to join too. Terms and conditions apply: there is only so much room on this ledge, after all; and the committee recommends taking out an insurance policy against a windy day.

Meeting friends and former colleagues was uplifting and enjoyable, and a little poignant. Some of those in the pub had left a while ago, either retiring, moving to other jobs or, in one case, having been made redundant a year ago. The spin-the-wheel redundancy game has been the thing for a while now. Sometimes the spinning finger of fate lets you escape, and then it doesn’t, and you are the one to walk.

Some readers on my old newspaper assume that I have retired. A letter from a kind and rather formidable reader was handed to me in the pub last night. This hoped that I would enjoy my retirement. I hope to do so one day, but not yet: too young for that, I’d say, and there are still the usual suspect bills to pay.

It was good meeting people and I certainly miss my old colleagues when I am sitting typing on this ledge. But once you have left a workplace, the old ties stretch and then snap. The relationships can continue, and I certainly hope they do, but your relationship with the job you once did is over. And that job is now being done differently by new people, or under an entirely new system.

Such are the ways in which one life disintegrates and another begins to take shape. That’s pretty much it for leaving dos for now, although a features desk lunch is still to come. Bit by bit, dusty atom by dusty atom, that which once had seemed solid now falls apart.

A FRIEND has passed on two old copies of The New Yorker magazine. They’ve been doing the rounds and she thought I might like to read them.

A cartoon in an edition from last November caught my eye. The cartoons, incidentally, are very good in this publication. In this one, a couple are slumped in front of the television, the woman lying on the sofa with her cat, while the main sits in an armchair with the remote in his hand. Both appear vaguely grumpy or at least puzzled. The caption reads: ‘At some point, there’s only so high you can raise the volume before you admit you’re never gonna understand what British detectives are saying.’

It’s a good joke, and one that plays with the divide between their culture and ours, always fertile ground for humour.

Yet this sort of thing cuts both ways. They sit on their sofas and don’t understand what our TV detectives are saying. We sit on ours watching the TV news and don’t understand the madness of their gun laws. With every awful mass slaying in the US, there is talk of greater gun control being introduced, only for the gun lobby to win the day again, reaffirming the right of every American to carry a gun and, or so it seems, use it not so much for self-defence but in random acts of mass slaughter.

The latest appalling example of this American disease occurred this week with the shooting of nine black church-goers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, by young a white gunman.

Dylann Roof, who had reportedly been given the gun by his parents, is said to have held a deep grudge against black people. A childhood friend, Joseph Meek Jr, told the Associated Press that they had never discussed race when growing up. Yet when they met again more recently, Roof had started to express his resentment of black people, telling Meek Jr that ‘blacks were taking over the world’ and that ‘someone needed to do something about it for the white race’. He also told his friend that he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. Meek Jr replied: ‘That’s not the way it should be,’ adding: ‘But he just kept talking about it.’

Other people will always hold views which we find abhorrent or just don’t understand. Up to a point, and within the confines of the law, they are free to believe whatever they wish. But add freely available guns into this picture, and you move from an argument about freedom of speech to something much more serious – deadly serious, in this latest outrage and others before.

Roof appears to have been an inadequate and deeply troubled young man, an apparently committed racist whose head was buzzing with hatred and a desire to stir up some kind of race war. To have a system where such a young man can carry arms is beyond belief.

The shooting of worshipers at Emanuel AME church has caused widespread dismay in the US, following, as it does, a series of shootings in which white police officers have killed black citizens. Guns and racism are a dangerous mix, whether the guns are carried by police officers or people intent on racial slaughter.

Barack Obama is said to have been so frustrated in the wake of the latest killings that he almost ran out of words – an eloquent statement in itself, as he is a man from whom the words usually flow. The president has called for greater gun control, saying, in words he did manage to get out: “At some point we will have to deal with the fact that this kind of mass violence doesn’t happen in other countries and it is in our power to do something about it.”

Will anything change? On past form it seems unlikely.

BEFORE circumstance left me standing on this ledge, I was often astride my bicycle. Man and bike are still to be found in perfect harmony, although not every day.

Cycling is the best and worst way to get around a city.

Best because it’s free, easy and good exercise.

Worst because of heavy traffic, HGVs the size of houses, buses that hop through red lights, electric buses that sneak up on you, cars coming so close their wing-mirrors give you a free back massage, U-turning taxis, car doors flung open without warning, holes in the road, broken glass strewn along streets favoured by hen parties and booze-cruising louts, and crazy fellow cyclists ­– not to forget pedestrians making kamikaze dashes across the road, headphones plugging their ears and eyes seemingly put on inside out by mistake that morning.

So I know why Boris swore.

According to reports yesterday and this morning, the Mayor of London and newly elected MP for Upper Blustershire (or somewhere) got into an argument with a black cab driver. The exchange of un-pleasantries ended with Boris offering that good old Cockney greeting: ‘Why don’t you f*** off and die, who don’t you f*** off and die – and not in that order.”

To which the cabbie responded with the traditional Cockney retort: ‘Yeah bollocks, I hope you die.’

Ah, let me take you to the streets of London…

The reported exchange was sparked off by the continuing row in the capital as Uber drivers undermine the traditional taxi trade by undercutting fares and allegedly not paying taxes, and also using sat-navs instead of having to learn the knowledge. They are presumably also not aware of important local customs, such as the swearing in the street of the mayor.

So what are we to make of this colourful stutter in the long march of Boris Johnson’s ambition to lead the Conservative Party? Brand Boris won’t be hurt by this contretemps as he seems to survive any potentially embarrassing situation with his jolly twit persona intact.

Yet Boris the nation’s upper-class fool is, Man On Ledge suggests, only a tiny part of this most ambitious man’s complex character. The exchange won’t have done him much if any harm, but if he’d like to find some different motorists to swear at, he could always bring his bicycle to York.

Incidentally, I did enjoy the quote in one newspaper, in which ‘a source closer to the mayor’ said: ‘Boris has dozens of chance conversations with Londoners every week. Many are productive and friendly, some are colourful, I know most end happily. I believe this particular cabbie however is a serial heckler.’

As too is Boris himself, the national’s serial heckler ­ – but not a cereal heckler. That would be a man who shouted at cornflakes.

SO, JULIAN, have you ever thought of murdering a newspaper executive? Funny you should ask that.

The question was posed in playful spirit by a number of people when I was made redundant. They did not have access to my inner dark side or anything, but merely wondered if killing off a newspaper boss in a crime novel might not in some small way be an act of revenge.

The odd thing is I murdered an editor years ago, long before I had reason for a grudge. The editor was Harry Hulme and the unpublished novel was called A Fine And Private Place, a title since used by other authors. It comes from the Andrew Marvell poem To His Coy Mistress, and the hero of my novel was a policeman called Andy Marvell (it’s that Eng Lit degree thing again).

The book was my first attempt at a novel. To write this column I seek out the fat envelope on the bookshelf, the one containing the typed out manuscript as rejected by a publisher or two. It has been years since I have looked at these words, and at a glance they are better than I remember, although that may be a fond delusion.

The novel opens by introducing Marvell, ‘It was raining, it was the start of his holiday, and the Indian take-away was leaking.’

After that we meet Hulme, “tall, mournful and grey-haired”. The sketched portrait is sympathetic in tone (ah, if only I had known). “It would have taken a feat of remarkable optimism to describe Hulme as happy go lucky, but he did not think of himself as a miserable man. After all, he had satisfied his early ambitions, even if being an editor was no longer quite the job it once had been. There was too much corporate-speak now, too much marketing, too much bollocks, was how he put it.’

I suspect an editor today would think similar things, only multiplied many times over. Anyway, Hulme isn’t long for this world. It is late at night or early in the morning more truthfully. ‘It was time to go home, long past time to go home.’ Hulme walks through the deserted newsroom and decides to go and look at the paper being printed, standing on a platform above the press.

‘The noise was thunderous as the paper flashed beneath him, a blur of headlines and pictures, a seamless, limitless newspaper, waiting to be cut and folded, dispatched, read and discarded. For a moment Hulme felt excitement stir inside him like a forgotten thing.’

As he thinks about newspapers and his life, Hulme is surprised from behind, crying ‘What the hell…?’

‘The sentence was never to be finished. Harry Hulme, the copy boy elevated to the editor’s chair, gasped in an agony of surprise. Something had ripped into his stomach. He looked down. It was a spike, a bloody copy spike. He gasped and staggered backwards as the spike lunged again, this time tearing into his neck.’

After a further struggle Hulme “toppled over the metal barrier and fell through the unsustaining air to land on the next day’s front page. There was a tearing, shuddering sound as the newsprint ripped apart and the body of the editor slumped on the rollers below…’

This scene was written long ago, years ago. I can hardly remember when. The novel as I recall it spins out from that murder to include asides on journalism, as well as a central plot about council corruption.

One publisher returned the package thanking me for sending “my treatment”, or so I recall. Even today with a couple of published novels to my name, I don’t know what that means. But he wasn’t interested and no one else was either, although that is not quite true. My wife read the book and loved it. Even today she says she liked it. Shame she’s not a literary agent.

If any passing publisher wishes to give the book the kiss of life, it is now called Do There Embrace (Mr Marvell again, the poet that is, not the policeman in the invented setting of Townley).

SO fracking is to be allowed at one site in Lancashire. To those who live on the other side of the great divide in Yorkshire, and who may be tempted to mutter “Best place for it”, it looks as if this mad dash to blow shale gas out of the ground is coming here too.

A protest group called Frack Free Ryedale has been set up to resist fracking in the area, and other Yorkshire sites are under consideration as well.

Before pondering this matter further, and indeed before getting to the Pope, Man On Ledge wishes to make a fanciful diversion. David Cameron and George Osborne are both big fans of fracking, a gloomy fact which for some reason brings the following scenario to mind. Can’t you just see them dad-dancing down the street and singing The Boys Are Frack In Town, with Cameron doing an air-guitar solo and Osborne doing an air-accounting solo, miming money rising up in a big tax-laden spurt?

Cameron says that his government is “going all out” for fracking in the UK, claiming it would create jobs and cut our reliance on gas imports. Man On Ledge prefers the alternative programme, the one called Not Going All Out, in which what energy remains is left in the ground and instead we concentrate on sustainable green energy.

Fracking is essentially just another bit of short-termism, blasting the earth beneath our feet just to get our hands on a few more years’ worth of fuel, in this case shale gas; it is, surely, akin to the alcoholic who swears that one last drop won’t do any harm, before smashing open the drinks cabinet and swallowing the contents of every bottle, then wondering where that massive headache came from.

I don’t wish to dwell on the technicalities here, the deep vertical wells with horizontal drilling extending outwards, along which water, sand and a lubricant chemical will be blasted to fracture the shale and release the gas it harbours.

No, instead I want to talk about the Pope – an unusual topic for a secular type with no traceable religious leanings, but there you go. Pope Francis is due this week to release a papal letter in which he will call for an ethical and economic revolution to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality. Basically, to circumvent the complications of this matter, not least that the letter isn’t published until Thursday, it looks as if Pope Francis will come out on the side of those who worry about what man is doing to the planet. This is not making him popular in the US with Republicans and Tea Party-types, who basically believe that climate change is one big con designed to punish rich Americans. ‘The pope ought to stay with his job, and we’ll stay with ours,’ was how Republican senator James Inhofe, king of the climate change deniers, put it.

Well, it is true that in the past Man On Ledge has worried about religious leaders getting involved in politics. But it is remarkable that Pope Francis is apparently about to make such a pro-green statement, even though the full details are not yet known.

And at least the Pope won’t be joining Dave and George singing The Boys Are Frack In Town any day soon.

OF all the titles to burnish a young life, that of “Britain’s youngest suicide bomber” must be one of the saddest. That is the label now attached to Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, who is believed to have died in a suicide bomb blast orchestrated by Islamic State. He was reported to have detonated a vehicle fitted with explosives while fighting for the militant group in Iraq.

At the time of writing, the young man’s family are still awaiting official confirmation, although they are reported to have seen pictures of what appears to be their son on a Twitter account linked to Isis.

So many aspects of this story are shocking, from the moulding of a young mind to carry out such an act, through the death of a young man described by his school as quiet, private and a typical teenager – and even through to Isis being linked to a Twitter, using the latest social media tools, often employed to unimportant or even frivolous ends, to such evil purpose.

In a sombre but sensible statement, Qari Asim, an imam at a mosque near to where Asmal grew up, argued that Isis leaders acted “like paedophiles” in grooming young men. He added that Isis were “running a sophisticated social media campaign and the community is concerned their faith is being used by hate preachers and internet groomers to manipulate their religion”.

It is hard not to agree with that, and difficult not to feel that the people who groomed this lad should have had the courage to go and explode the bomb themselves, rather than somehow convincing a naïve 17-year-old to do the job for them.

It seems that for young Muslims there are dangerous spells at work in the world. Talha Asmal’s family said in a statement that he was “a loving, kind, caring and affable teenage. He never harboured any ill will against anybody nor did he ever exhibit any violent, extreme or radical views of any kind”. They added that his “tender years and naivety” were exploited in an act of “deliberate and calculated grooming”. It’s hard not to agree with that and we can only sympathise with a family who have lost a son in such a cruel and outlandish manner.

Only a few dashed words today. Our first internet-sourced B&B guests have been and gone, a father and son in York as part of a tour for a band featuring the son, his brother and others. It was strange but enjoyable having people in the house. Fringe benefits too: proper coffee for breakfast, and that usually only happens when my mother and her partner come to stay. When they leave my head is usually up in the caffeine clouds. Now there is a lull before a family party arrives. My father was 83 the other week and we usually throw a party of brothers, cousins and so on around the time of his birthday. One brother is arriving from Barnsley, the other from France.

Silly thought for the day: Cat food is often labelled as being for ‘indoor cats’ or ‘outdoor cats’, young or old cats or whatever. I looked but couldn’t find a packet with a label saying: “For indoor/outdoor/back indoors again cats, especially at 3am after yowling on the conservatory roof sort of cats. For mad cats that like to come in one window, go out the back door and return to the front window.’

But I must away, as no one even really says, as the doorbell is ringing.

SOME people upon elevation are known to insist on their honour always being used. The actor Sir Ben Kingsley was once said to complain if ‘Sir’ wasn’t attached to his name, although instances of such behaviour occur less often nowadays. When we bump into each other in the street he is fine with just plain Ben (well, I made that bit up, and the reports of subsiding levels of sir-ness come from Wikipedia, so who knows, perhaps he does or doesn’t).

I wonder if George Ivan Morrison, born in Hyndford Street, Belfast, on August 31, 1945, will continue the high-handed tradition. For Van Morrison has just been knighted. Was this honour bestowed for sometimes wonderful music or for impressive levels of grumpiness maintained throughout a long career? Not sure, the Queen isn’t telling. But I bet she’s nervous about putting that sword on his shoulder.

Patrick Humphries sums up Van’s character nicely in his fine little CD-sized book The Complete Guide To The Music of Van Morrison, from where I have taken the birth details (why are we still happier to believe books than wiki-this and wiki-that). “He grew up to be a legend: a songwriter of genius and an interviewer’s nightmare, a grumpy old man and a transcendent soul singer.”

At his best, Sir Van can certainly transcend; and at his worst he is music’s great misanthrope. I have seen Van many times, starting with the first Knebworth Festival more than 40 years ago on July 20, 1974 (that’s from the internet, so fingers crossed). Hang on, rewind a minute: more than 40 years ago, how is that possible? Time seems to have done that old accumulation trick again when I wasn’t paying attention.

Anyway, Sir Van has made some of the loveliest music around, and St Dominic’s Preview is ringing in my ears as I write. And with A Night In San Francisco, he produced the best live album ever recorded. Apologies for being tediously definitive, but it just is.

But the grumpy nights, they can sting. Once at the York Barbican he was in such a foul mood, turning to glower at his drummer on every other beat, that the concert was over in less than an hour and we were in the pub by 9pm. That was back in the babysitting days, and we thought we might as well draw some advantage from Van’s sour petulance.

For his ups and downs, for occasional moments of sunshine such as Bright Side Of The Road, Wavelength or Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile), Van remains a musical hero to this writer. And mostly for that wonderful voice, which has not diminished with the years – in fact, it has softened without losing its rim of soul, and is still an instrument of wonder.

My life do date would have been a paler thing without Van and his music. So arise, Sir Van. Just don’t get in a huff about it.

Footnote: Man On Ledge is aware of the irony of doubting the truth of the internet while writing in the same medium. Go on, we all need our inconsistencies, don’t we?