THERE is nothing admirable in the tale of the Tory MP who blocked a parliamentary bill that would make “upskirting” a criminal offence, apart that is from the malleability of the English language.

I wasn’t aware of the word or the voyeuristic deed it conveys until recently. On making that unhappy discovery, I remained puzzled about why any man would wish to take such an intimate and intrusive photograph.

However odd the offence, and some people truly are strange, you can at least appreciate the way the language has had to adapt. The English language always finds a way, even if what is being described could happily have been left undescribed.

According to a quick Google, “upskirting” has been used to describe sexually intrusive photographs taken up women’s skirts since around 2004 – long before the word or the activity were known to me. While the activity might be weird and threatening and demeaning, the word is a no-nonsense label leaving little doubt as to its meaning.

A woman who suffered such surreptitious photographs alerted the police, only to be told that what had occurred wasn’t against the law. Gina Martin took up the cause and brought it all the way to Parliament, where the LibDem MP Wera Hobbhouse yesterday introduced a bill to have “upskirting” made a criminal offence punishable by up the two years in prison.

All political parties supported the bill, so here was an encouraging tale of a young woman managing to bring about a change to the law. Or it would have been apart from the actions of Christopher Chope, a 71-year-old Tory MP who makes a habit of blocking private bills put forward by members.

All Chope had to do to block the bill was shout “Object” – and that, thanks to the arcane ways of parliament, was that.

It turns out that he is a serial objector, and that he didn’t even understand what “upskirting” was but had blocked the bill on principle because he doesn’t approve of legislation that isn’t discussed properly.

Does this odd principle make him appear any less of a fool? That would be a “no”. He looks like the sort of caricature backwoodsman twerp you still expect to encounter in the Tory party. His actions rendered him ridiculous and brought condemnation from all sides, including members of his own party.

Incidentally, Chope is known for his social illiberalism, having frequently voted against gay rights. Yesterday he also delayed a bill aimed to protect police dogs and horses. He is also, you may not be surprised to discover, an ardent Brexiteer, who only yesterday was to be found ranting in the Daily Express about how naïve Britain was being in its negotiations with the EU.

The “upskirting” bill will be given another chance next month, at which point the Conservatives should perhaps consider locking Chope in a cupboard – or uplocking him to prevent further upcocking

NO ONE could say for sure when the thing started to eat itself, although the signs had been there for all to see.

The thing had been born at the shallow end of a pernicious pool. It was popular with a majority for a while but hated by others. Perhaps the thing suffered from what a famous politician once called inexactitude and less wordy sorts refer to as lying. It certainly had a taste for bitter juice squeezed from liar lemons.

The thing with the thing is, nobody knows what it is meant to be. Oh, sure – plenty of people, quite a few of them editors, sold us the thing: it was going to be a marvellous thing, so much better than the present unpatriotic arrangement; a glorious thing, a thing of unparalleled wonder that would lead us to sunny uplands, a place visited in a dream one of the editors had after he’d been on the red wine.

But then the arguments grew louder and more tortuous, about what sort of thing it was, whether hard or soft to the touch, and people began to wonder who had sold them this thing in the first place.

In opinion surveys, 70% of those who had backed the thing now said they didn’t think it was going at all well. “We no longer like the look of this thing,” they muttered. “The people in charge don’t have a clue what it is meant to be. Mostly they are scrapping among themselves while trying to keep their own jobs.”

And now the thing was eating itself. After nearly two years of eating everything in sight with an insatiable appetite, chomping headlines like there was no tomorrow, and perhaps there won’t be, now it was eating itself.

Some said the thing was a giant snake that had long ago shed its skin, the skin that looked like a flag. Now the skin was dark and gnarly and poisonous to the touch.

Others said the giant snake didn’t have a mouth but instead had two anuses and it could talk out of at the same time; but then sensible observers said: “Oh, that’s just Boris being Boris.”

Whatever the thing was, the friends we have fallen out with, the ones over the water, they just shrugged. “They got themselves this thing so why should we help them with it?” they said.

Our old friends didn’t understand the thing. They were bored with the thing and who could blame them. It was the worst, mostly pointless thing many of us could remember.

And somewhere in a posh shed there sat a man who unleashed the thing. The man who gave us the thing hummed a happy tune to himself. “Perhaps the thing won’t be so bad after all,” he told himself, fortified by lemonade made from those liar lemons. He seemed to have forgotten that he had let the thing out of the cage while attempting to protect himself and his party. The thing had swallowed him the very next morning, then spat him out. And now it was chewing itself for breakfast.

The man in the posh shed shrugged and carried on humming. For he knew he did not make mistakes.

Some albums were almost forgotten until the turntable allowed for resuscitation. This jazz/soul hybrid from 1985 hadn’t been heard for years.

Now I know that some readers will raise their hands in horror at the J-word, but jazz has been a constant in the music collection, and the 1980s were great for British jazz, with Courtney Pine, Loose Tubes and Andy Sheppard (Andy is a star turn in the vinyl canyon, and the CD cave).

Two thoughts arise on hearing this album from Working Week: it sounds as fresh and exciting now as it did then; and the album is jazzier than remembered.

Working Week were essentially guitarist Simon Booth and saxophonist Larry Stabbins. The soul element came from singer Julie Roberts (she later changed her first name to Juliet), owner of a powerful voice and great sensibility and phrasing, too.

The jazz element was boosted by star guests including trumpeters Guy Barker and Harry Beckett, sax player Chris Briscoe and trombonist Annie Whitehead. Louis Moholo-Moholo took care of the drums.

The 1985 vinyl release on Virgin is a handsome affair in the way albums sometimes were. It came with the eight-track album, plus a 12in single, all stylishly wrapped in the mottled blue double cover.

The track Working Week are most remembered for is Venceremos, dedicated to Chilean singer, activist and poet Victor Jara, who was tortured and killed under the Pinochet dictatorship. It’s a strong song still, and on the album in general there isn’t a wasted note, just powerful soul-jazz grooves (if you’ll excuse the over-excited muso speak).

The album opens with the band’s take on Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues – a fitting start, and the music throughout is blisteringly good: sharp, warm and full of great playing.

Guest vocalists on Venceremos include Tracey Thorn and Robert Wyatt, while Juliet Tippets takes over lead vocals for Storm Of Light.

POLDARK on BBC1 is a guilty pleasure, part soap and part costume drama, although sometimes the hero doesn’t wear much in the way of a costume.

Many of our newspapers went weak at the knees when they used this BBC promo-shot of Aidan Turner emerging from the waters in his James Bond moment.

I’ve watched that first new episode now, and two thoughts arise. One is that in context this was ironic and sad rather than swaggering, as the dripping – or possibly drippy – Ross is still recovering from Demelza’s romp in the dunes with the handsome fellow who has the headaches.

And the second thought is more involved.

You see, those pictures on many of the front pages were then followed by mock-angst from columnists: why is it all right for women to ogle men but not for men to ogle women, that sort of hand-wringing exercise.

My own thoughts on that salty emergence were as follows. Seeing Aidan Turner/Ross Poldark rise from the sea reminded me of myself getting out of the shower of a morning. Or it did if Ross was 61, bald, a little on the short side and in need of losing half a stone or so.

Other than that, the resemblance was remarkable.

If women sometimes feel they are measured unkindly by screen representations,  men can pipe up with a moan when Aidan gets his shirt off.

Except that, traditionally at least, men are not assessed on their looks and their bodies to the same extent. Maybe Turner and Daniel Craig are just redressing the balance.

Incidentally, Craig said in an interview in 2008 that his defining sex symbol moment in Casino Royale came about by accident. He swam into an inconveniently placed sand bank and had to walk back to the shore. And if you believe that, it’s entirely your own business.

Unusually perhaps, I am the Poldark fan in this house, as my wife is not enamoured. I like the silliness, the high drama and the lash of melodrama.

There are two key villains: slimy George Warleggan, Poldark’s old adversary, and the toe-sucking vicar, Ossie Whitworth. Of the two, the man of God is the more repellent. He is married to Morwenna, who loves another, as you would also.

On Sunday – spoiler alert – Morwenna’s true love nearly dangled at the end of a rope.

Poldark came to the rescue, armed with a frown. His facial furrows often do plot duty. Ross Poldark is a few feet short of being a laugh, unlike Aidan Turner, who was quite merry on the Graham Norton Show the other week.

Let’s move on to another handsome male, Don Draper in the US drama Man Men. I loved this series, then lost it thanks to a spot of Sky poaching. Our new TV box has Netflix and the other day I spotted the drama on there.

It’s been good to catch up. We are on series six. The drama’s best days may be gone, perhaps, but it is still compelling. Jon Hamm is handsome in a bristled, rugged manner, but he doesn’t mind putting his looks to self-harming effect.

He is almost unrecognisable in that great film Baby Driver. In Mad Men, he is recognisable  as a man on the slow slide. Draper is a great character, although he doesn’t bring me out in man envy goosebumps.  I’d love the hair, but not much else.

So far, Draper has cheated on his lovely second wife by shagging his friend’s wife and vomited whisky into a bin at a funeral, while blaming a stomach bug.

He has the haunted air of a man who signed a deal with the devil and has only just got around to reading the small print. When he takes his white shirt and tie off for all that extracurricular sex, he’s in surprisingly good shape for a man powered by cigarettes and whisky fumes.

I guess you can dust off that unreliable word historic. This morning “Little Rocket Man” and the “mentally deranged US dotard” put aside their differences and shook hands for the sake of the show.

The photographs are certainly impressive, with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un standing in profile before a line of their countries’ flags. For now, symbol wins over substance.

Trump said that “a lot of progress was made”, although the actual talks are said to have lasted 38 minutes – almost the time it takes to bash out one of these blogs of a morning.

After stropping out of the G7 talks and leaving everything in disarray, Trump moves from the bilateral world he hates – all that having to listen to other people go on and on about boring stuff – to the unilateral, egotistical “look what I did” world of doing the deal.

Incidentally, did you know that Trump is reported to have come to a terrible deal over the royalties for The Art of the Deal? According to a report on the Politico website, Tony Schwartz – the man hired to do the troublesome, time-consuming job of writing the book – was the one who got the art out of that contract.

Instead of a flat fee or a modest percentage, Trump agreed to give Schwartz half of the $500,000 advance and half of the royalties, with hardly any haggling at all.

Unheard of generosity for a writer, especially one hired by a man who claims to be king of the deal. A small point, perhaps, but worth bearing in mind as all the words puff out this morning: is the deal with North Korea good, bad or nothing but a little dazzle of a plot twist in the world soap opera?

At the time of typing, the details are still being sifted over, although one key point appears to be that Trump and Kim “commit to work toward the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”.

If that ever happens, that would be a good day for the world. But a much better day for the world would be if all countries committed to work towards denuclearisation.

Maybe it’s a point so obvious that no one seems to make it. But here goes anyway. Why is it bad for North Korea to have nuclear weapons and perfectly fine for the US to be armed to Trump’s teeth with them; why is it unconscionable for Iran to consider making a nuclear bomb when Israel is said to have been secretly making nuclear bombs since the 1950s? The world would be a whole lot safer if no one had these bombs.

As for the art of the deal with Kim, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what really lies behind the “aren’t I great” Trump hyperbole.

“Guess what, we have a world to run.”

Who could possibly say such a thing? No big cigar for guessing that those words tumbled from Trumpian lips.

I kept hearing the words long afterwards and they started to worry me.

The thing about Trump is that you almost don’t want to think about him at all. You know, put your fingers in your ears and hope he goes away.

For a while I wondered if we should have a trade embargo on the words that come out of the president’s mouth. We could slap an import ban on those inflammatory, contradictory, truth-swerving words of his, and say in effect: no thanks, you’re not coming in here. You want to have a trade war, we’ll stop trading in your nasty words.

“Guess what, we have a world to run.” There they go again, around and around. The thing is again, we should be careful with our vowels around Trump. For if you accidentally slip an extra letter into that last word, you end up with something horribly closer to the truth – “Guess what, we have a world to ruin.” And in the long run, ruin it he surely will.

The president was speaking as he swept into Canada for the G7 Summit he didn’t want to attend.

Trump hates summits and he arrived late at this one and left early, like the sort who hogs the social limelight by barging late into a party just so that everybody notices; and leaves early for the same reason.

Trump detests summits such as the G7 because they aren’t about him; instead, these gatherings are based around collaboration and people expect him to listen and want him to take notice of what they say. But Trump doesn’t do listening: he has word-proof eardrums that send unwanted comments and conversations bouncing right back.

That’s why he is said to have turned against Mrs Maybe, reportedly saying that he is tired of her “school mistress tone” and the way she tells him off or has serious policy discussions rather than engaging in the small talk. Even those of us who are not fans of the prime minister can clap her on the nervous shoulders for that.

Trump arrived late at the G7 party, long past the nibbles stage, and immediately said that Russia should be allowed back in – “Why are we having the meeting without Russia?” he said, no doubt knocking over a tray of something or other.

Russia is suspended after annexing the Crimea, and the other main countries want Russia kept out; Russia isn’t even bothered about coming back in.

But Trump only gets noticed by saying the unexpected in a loud voice, and he said that just so that no one would wonder who the orange-faced man with the weird hair was, the one standing quietly in the corner (as bloody if, and all that).

Our own Boris Johnson – that’s if any of us wish to own him, which we don’t – has been reported as praising Trump at a private meeting, saying that the Brexit talks would have been sorted out by now if Trump was in charge.

What nonsense: Trump wouldn’t last five minutes in boring talks with the EU, as he’d have a gigantic, self-serving hissy-huff and leave.

Johnson is much taken with Trump, and the reasons are obvious: they are the same man, sort of – attention seekers the pair of them, unreliable and untrustworthy friends.

You know, it occurs to me that Trump and Johnson are like one of those reversible jackets. Turned one way round and you have Trump; reverse the jacket and you have Johnson (and I am resisting all that matey ‘Boris’ stuff).

Time that jacket went to the cleaners; or the tip.

YOU know you’ve been around for a while when you can remember the new editor of the Daily Mail as a trainee.

Geordie Greig arrived all young, fresh-faced and ineffably posh. He didn’t stay long, but he had a brilliant career to be getting on with.

He was an unlikely character for Deptford High Street, where you didn’t in those days bump into many Old Etonians.

The editor, Roger Norman, took a shine to him, and he must have had a good eye. He took a shine to me too, after he placed a job advert written in Chas and Dave language – “Gertcha is a good old Cockney word now sweeping the country…” or something like that – and I replied in Cockney-speak.

Norman’s faith in Greig was extravagantly fulfilled; his faith in me less so. I’d written the best job application letter he’d ever seen, he later told me. Being able to turn my hand to a quick bit of writing got me where I am today; exactly where that might be is something I am still trying to figure out.

Anyway, Geordie Greig was charming back in the mid-1980s. He got stuck into the job, chatting to old Deptford characters like a visitor from a distant planet, which of course he was.

I’ve charted his rise from my chair in the cheap seats. According to this morning’s Guardian, Greig joined the South East London Mercury – not, as they report, the Kentish Mercury – after Oxford, having turned down a career in banking.

The next bit is new to me… “At the same time his sister was working as a lady-in-waiting for Princess Diana, meaning Greig would go from interviewing south London gang leaders over lunch to tea with royalty.”

A spot of colourful elaboration going on there, as we didn’t interview that many gang leaders, but it’s a good tale.

The office was next to the station and you could see the platform from your desk. Greig wandered fresh-faced into this land of cigar smoke and afternoon beer fumes, and got on with reporting.

After we both left, I kept an envious eye on his rise: culture reporter for the Sunday Times, editor of Tatler, editor of the Evening Standard, then editor of Mail on Sunday. Never mind the editing jobs, but that stint on the Sunday Times would have suited me.

Now Greig is to replace Paul Dacre, who is either a brilliant editor or a right-wing ogre, depending on opinion. I guess a fair-minded person would say he is a bit of both, although having a heavy hand with the poison bottle.

Much comment on Greig’s latest elevation centres on his differences with Dacre: Greig is a Remainer while Dacre is the Brexiteer in chief.

Some commentators believe Dacre caused Brexit by tipping the balance in the referendum. Somewhere in on the dusty recesses of this blog you will discover my argument that Dacre’s feud with David Cameron led him to go all out for Brexit.

This morning’s Mail has the usual pro-Brexit headline: “Hammond gets both barrels from Boris.” Will the paper’s position change under Greig; and, if so, could that make life even more difficult for Mrs Maybe?

It is also reported that Greig’s elevation is in part down to his friendship with Lady Rothermere, the proprietor’s wife. Belonging to the upper-class club has clearly done him many favours. But you don’t get by on those advantages alone, so he must have something else going for him.

An old profile in the Guardian quotes his former boss at Conde Nast, Nicholas Coleridge, describing him as “50% courtier, 50% old-school hack”.

Geordie Greig arrived in Deptford fully laden with the first quality; I like to think he picked up the second on the south London beat.

As for those gang bosses, I suspect he spent more time talking to Father Diamond at St Paul’s, the surprisingly fine Baroque church tucked just off the high street.

The thing is, me and Nanci drifted in the end. Later albums never satisfied in the same way. But after last week’s blog about having a blokeish album collection, this record from 1986 was sought out again – and what a sweet listen it is. Not saccharine sweet, though, as Griffith always has a citric tang beneath the dusting of sugar.

The sour-sweet regret of country music, I guess you’d call it, mixed with her take on folk.

She is still recording and, according to her website, still quietly seething – “I’ve had a hard life, and I write it down,” she sings on the title track of her new album, Intersection.

Was her life hard back in 1986? Who knows, but she was effortlessly stylish in the album shots, the two cover photographs showing her posing holding hardback books. On the front she is outside a Woolworth’s Luncheonette, wearing a long white dress decorated with black spots (and, yes, that is Lyle Lovett dancing with someone in the background). On the back, she changed into a long floral number, matched with pink ankle socks and brown lace-up ankle boots, while cradling a copy of Lonesome Dove by the Texan author Larry McMurtry.

The Daily Telegraph recently picked The Last Of The True Believers for one of those lists – in this case, “50 essential albums you’ve probably never heard”. Essential, yes – but “never heard”? Dear me, no. This one was rarely off the turntable for a while.

There are some great songs here, none better than the surging title track, full of regret and hot Texas winds that “keep on slappin’ my face with dust so thick that the tears won’t roll again”.

Love At The Five & Dime is a teenage love story about 16-year-old Rita – “hazel eyes & chestnut hair”. But it’s a story told from the dull shores of adulthood, with the sweet-romancing Eddie, the boy she danced with at the Five & Dime, no longer able to play in bands as “arthritis took his hands”.

Well, you don’t do looking at Nani Griffith’s lyrics looking for a laugh. That sense of sadness, of loss beneath the surface, even of the older Griffith saying she’s had a hard life yet looking gorgeously cool in these photographs; all of that somehow adds depth and shade to her music.

And the songs here are great, none better than More Than A Whisper, a lonely woman’s plea for her distant man to call – “We have not spoken since last fall/now that smoky conversation’s come and gone”. Instead she consoles herself with “winter wine”.

There is, incidentally, a lot of weather on this album, hot Texan nights anticipating winter pounding on your door.

Griffith’s voice is crystalline, the songs are sad and sometimes playful, sometimes warm and sometimes shot through with southern spirit. The album ends with the poignant farewell notes of The Wing & the Wheel – “Here’s to all the dreamers… may our open hearts find rest.”

Lyle Lovett doesn’t only dance on the cover, he sings backing vocals, too.

CROSSRAIL is a major bit of infrastructure in London; it might also be a new compound word to describe how many commuters feel about attempting to travel by rail.

While Crossrail is an undeniably impressive feat of engineering, it is also a symbol to the north of how all the money is spent in London and the south. The project has swallowed up £15bn – a lot of the national quid.

Today newspapers across the north unite in attacking transport secretary Chris Grayling for presiding over the utter chaos of the botched timetable changes that have caused delays and cancellations for thousands.

Before joining that regional throng, let’s just admit there has been timetable chaos in the south, too. While Northern Rail may be cancelling trains all over the northern shop, Govia Thameslink Railway has been holding up its end by causing misery for southern commuters.

And it’s not, strictly speaking, true that the government won’t spend money in the north: just look at all the taxpayers’ millions Mr Grayling is eager to throw at the East Coast line to bail out the failed Virgin/Stagecoach franchise – while also insisting that privatised rail is best (even if it has a bottomless appetite for swallowing public money).

Incidentally, Richard Branson was on the radio the other day explaining how he was training to get fit to go in space. And I couldn’t help but trundle out the obvious insult: you can’t even manage to run trains to York, mate.

So now let’s look at the north, where Northern is said to be cancelling 57% of train journeys – which, as even a maths dunderhead can calculate, is more than half.

The 25 newspapers united in anger today include the Yorkshire Post, the Manchester Evening News and the Liverpool Echo – and even in today’s diminished newspaper landscape, the 25 papers sell between them 300,000 copies per edition.

It is quite something to see rival newspapers coming together, and this reminds us that rather than being fractured in competition, newspapers can occasionally unite on one important issue. And in this case the north is chorusing that Mr Grayling should resign.

One of the many dull mysteries about Mr Grayling is that he ever gets to keep a job in Cabinet (this might be called the Dr Liam Fox equation to indicate those terrible people who foul up but manage to get their foot back in the door).

You may recall that Mr Grayling caused chaos in the prison system during his spell as justice secretary, in part by forcing privatisation on the prison system and cutting staff numbers.

Now he has the national train set to play with – and he seems intent on throwing money at privatised rail, while refusing to heed the concerns of the travelling public.

Yesterday he finally faced MPs, looking – as well he might – a little twitchy and anxious. But Mr Grayling still sang the same old tune from the Bart Simpson hymn book: “It wasn’t me”. As usual, everyone else was to blame for the timetable fiasco – mostly it was Network Rail’s fault, he grumbled.

While this is a national problem, the north has suffered from years of overcrowded trains, cancelled trains, trains that are too short or too hot, routes that are too rubbish by half. How are we still in a situation when it takes almost as long to shake and rattle your way to Manchester from Leeds or York as it does to be swept down to London on the on-off privatised East Coast mainline?

Should Chris Grayling go as the editors of all those northern newspapers are saying this morning? Oh, sure – I’m not about to defend the indefensible Mr Grayling. He can be sacked from that job and any others he might fluke his way into in future as far as I’m concerned.

But will a fresh face – or as fresh a face as the Government can find – really make a difference? Perhaps Mr Grayling should stay and sort out the mess, take the blame and do something, rather than be allowed to slink away muttering: “It wasn’t me.”

As for all those northern newspapers, normally they speak for their smaller region, while dissing the neighbours and rival publishers.

The editors should band together more often: it’s good to hear the north speaking with one voice.

I AM reading the BBC website’s review of the morning papers on my phone when the same item pops up on the Today programme. Word for word, the script is the same: what I am reading is being read out on the radio, too.

This isn’t, when you think of it, surprising. But it still feels like a discovery.

One of the stories read out on the radio from the script on my phone concerns the police search, 40 years after the event, for Jeremy Thorpe’s hitman. Andrew Newton was assumed to have died, until the Mail on Sunday tracked him down yesterday. Today’s Daily Mail has a photo of two police officers standing at the door of his Surrey home, looking up, and with the headline “A VERY ENGLISH FARCE!”

I hadn’t realised before the extent to which the police base their investigations on what’s been on the telly the night before. But there they were, setting off in search of Newton after the last episode of A Very English Scandal, the top-notch drama by Russell T Davies – only to find that he’d disappeared.

Rumours that officers have been sent out to investigate an ancient case of blinding after the chief constable’s wife suggested he watch King Lear can be discounted. Or at least I hope so, but you never know.

A Very English Scandal has been the drama delight of the year: stylish, funny and supremely confident, it didn’t waste a single minute or a single frame.

The great revelation was Hugh Grant’s unerringly convincing turn as Liberal leader Thorpe. Banished by this performance are all those stuttering upper-class Englishmen he used to play. Here, Grant unleashed something much darker, while also managing to look uncannily like Thorpe.

In last night’s closing episode, which recreated what was often referred to as the Trial of the Century, Thorpe was shown being acquitted of hiring a hitman to silence Norman Scott, his spurned homosexual lover.

Grant caught brilliantly Thorpe’s mixture of arrogance at being acquitted of something he’d done and his creeping realisation that he was doomed anyway, however much he insisted on that dubious innocence. The cheery waves, popping champagne corks and steadfast wife couldn’t hide this haunting knowledge.

Great stuff all round, with Ben Whishaw equally brilliant as Scott.

As an interesting coda to the drama and the whole affair, BBC4 ran an updated documentary from 1979 by Panorama reporter Tom Mangold.

The programme was made on the assumption that Thorpe would be found guilty. When he wasn’t, the BBC bosses ordered all copies to be destroyed, but Mangold kept one back – and that’s why his fascinating story could be told 40 years too late.

I popped out yesterday afternoon to spend an hour or so watching an act or two at the Black Swan Folk Weekend – a great three-day event in York. Three hours or so later, I wobbled back on my bike, having stayed longer than expected, and having drunk a little more beer than intended.

I could easily have stayed until the end, but that wouldn’t have left me in good shape for today.

Here’s who I caught: David Ward Maclean, Soundsphere, Bella Gaffney & Polly Bolton (pictured), and Union Jill.

All were wonderful, but two were new to me. I’d seen Soundsphere once before, Union Jill a couple of times – but had never caught up before with David Ward Maclean: fantastic voice, great guitar, splendidly gruff stage presence.

As for York duo Gaffney & Bolton, they are surely rising stars of the folk scene, a blistering young folk duo of great skill and much charm. Catch them while you can.