The Cloud Factory, sung by June Tabor, written by Bill Caddick.

This isn't a song that has a long history for me - I first heard it a few weeks ago. But the beauty and pain of it brought my up short. Thanks to the BBC's wonderful Listen Again service, I was able to listen to it again - and I called greg to listen to it with me. By the end of it I was crying.

This song makes me think so much of Dad - and there's also touches of my mother in there, always seeming brisk and practical - and yet ... so in tune with him. Unlike the song, she died first - but even so, the whole thing just fitted how they were together ...

This is one that I'd love it if you all tried to listen to ... many of you were there for me when I was going through that awful time when Dad was so ill and then died. Your comments were so important to me then - and I am still so grateful.

This song says it all, really - so it makes it for my Twelfth Day.

My Father taught me how to sing
He sang that dreams are everything
Can't be bought and can't be sold
More than silver, more than gold.

And, while I would like to tell all why I love this song so, I am suffering the aftereffects of having a broken tooth forcefully removed from my gums and am feeling fairly fragile.

So I shall just give you the lyrics, and post upon this another time ...

It was written by Marriott Edgar, and is most famous as a monologue by Stanley Holloway (imagine it with a Lancashire accent. Like they have on Coronation Street). Stanley Holloway is probably best known t'other side of the pond for playing Eliza Doolittle's dustman father in "My Fair Lady", but he was a great comedian.

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Yes, another opera one. This one needs to be sung by Placido Domingo.

I've never actually seen or, for that matter, heard Tosca all the way through. It's not a heart-love as La Boheme is. But, like all Puccini opera's, it has some stunning arias, and none finer than this, where the patriot Cavaradossi, sentenced to death, sings of his memory of his love (Tosca) before he prepares to die in despair. You don't need to understand the words. It's all their in the music, the hesitations and rushes of liquid notes that pour out as though emotions are hesitant ... and then sweeping all before them ..

The stars were brightly shining, faint perfumes pervaded the air, the garden gate creaked, she walked stealthily through the path, entered the villa and fell fragrant in my arms. She talked about herself and asked about me with capricious commands. She gave me sweet kisses, tender caresses and disclosed her voluptuous forms through the veils as I trembled! Now the beautiful dream of love has vanished forever...The hour has fled and I die despairing! Never has life been so dear to me!

However, the thing that really makes this song special is that it was sung during the first Three Tenors concert, which was broadcast live.

As Wikipedia says: The Three Tenors is a name given to collaborative concerts of the three operatic tenors Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. The trio began their collaboration with a debut concert at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome held on the eve of the 1990 FIFA World Cup final in Italy, on July 7, 1990, with Zubin Mehta conducting the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Orchestra del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. The idea of the concert was originally conceived by the Italian manager/producer Mario Dradi. The first concert was held to raise money for Carreras's foundation and also as a way for his contemporaries, Domingo and Pavarotti, to welcome their friend and colleague back to the world of opera after his successful treatment for leukemia.

What Wikipedia neglects to say, for some unaccountable reason, was that July 7 1990 was the day that Greg and I had our wedding blessed.

We married earlier in the year, at a registry office. It was a secret thing, just after we bought our house. We told Greg's Dad, my parents and a few close friends that we were taking them all out for a treat to celebrate. The house had the builders in and was nowhere ready for occupation, but we had a word with the builder, and he made sure we had lights and water, and we set up our bed in the middle of the othersie empty bedroom so that our first marrried night would be our first night in our new home.

Then we gathered our friends and family together and I came in wearing my engagement ring - and everyone said, "Oh, you're getting engaged! That's why we're having the celebration!" And we smiled and nodded. Then I turned to my friend Gill and said, "Gill, would you be my witness?" Gill was actually in on the secret - as Greg wisely realised that if I didn't have a safety valve, I might explode with excitement. So she nodded and said, "Of course I will!"

Then we turned to Greg's friend Chris and Greg said, "And will you be my witness?"

And Chris said, just as we guessed he would, "Yes, of course! And when are you getting married?"

So we looked at our watches and said, "Oh, in about three quarters of an hour."

Shrieks all round - then we bundled into taxis, went off and did the deed. It was lovely. As was shocking people at work the following Monday.

But we'd decided even then that we would have our wedding blessed in church - which would be the excuse for a huge party. I had a dress made for it, but I made the bridesmaids' dresses and did the catering - with help from friends and my fourth form class who acted as ushers. There are some good tales from that - but tonight is very late, so I shall just say that after it was all over, we went home. We were catching a night ferry to France, and we planning to grab a few hours sleep, but we were on far too much of a high to sleep, so we ended up watching the concert and adoring it. Then we piled into the car and set off for our honeymoon in France.

We drove down to Talloires on the shores of Lake Annercy, which I still think one of the most beautiful places in all the world. Our first stop was at a rather good hotel we knew in a place called Vitry-le-Francois. We got off the ferry at about 4am and drove through the dawn. We slept for a couple of hours in a layby, then pushed on to Reims to visit the Cathedral (vast and high and cold in the morning air, whiffy with incense). We reached Vitry around 2pm, utterly exhausted. I was still clutching my bouquet - although I had thrown it, I had then reclaimed it and now refused to be parted from it.

"Ah," said the hotel staff when they saw us, "voyage d'amour!"

and then thought it so romantic when we nodded, grabbed the keys and hurtled upstairs to our room.

In fact we just collapsed onto the bed and slept for five solid hours ...

So today's song reminds me of our whole wedding, blessing and honeymoon, all rolled into one.

Or rather I listened to the version sung by Cleo Laine - He was Beautiful.

There's another version, sung - I think - but Dinah Shore, but it was this one that I fell in love with (and to, for that matter) in my last year as an undergraduate.

I've written about this relationship before on my LJ.

I met someone at Oxford in my second year. He'd had a roguish past, but once we met, he settled down and we became a noted couple. In effect, we were living together for my last two years in Oxford. And I loved him ... but I also began to feel trapped. He drank, heavily - although most of us did at the time. But most of us were on top of it, and subsequently went on to drink in moderation or not at all. His drinking seemed to be getting out of control. He was witty and outrageous when drunk, but as time went on the wit seemed to become lost in the outrageousness. It stopped being funny and started to become embarrassing. And I became aware that friends were pitying me for getting into this place.

I became aware that it was possible to love someone, and yet have a crush on someone else. It was a shock for me. I had thought that once you fell in love with someone, that was it - you had found your soulmate and would be with them for ever and ever. But suddenly I was still loving him, and yet having a crush on a rather dull and boring guy whose politics were diametrically opposed to mine, and not being quite sure why.

Well, that ended. And I was moving closer to Finals, to leaving Oxford. His mother was eagerly anticipating our marruiage, and planned to give us her chesterfield. And I was conscious that I didn't want to go there ...

I was popular at Oxford. I was part of a bright and charming social set that people were eager to join. I think most of us were aware that this was fleeting that we were golden lads and lasses who must, as chimney sweepers come to dust ... and that added to the hedonism of our lives and our fun. And he had, by now, already graduated. He had a job, and I think he envied my grasshopper existence. Certainly there came to be an element of jealousy, of possessiveness that hadn't been there before. A friend and I threw a party together - and he chose it to drag me into a corner and spend three hours shouting at me.

To an extent, it probably was my fault. My behaviour may well have been making him unhappy - he was certainly aware that there were other men who were attracted to me and that, to an extent, I held court and would allow these men to take me out to dinner, to squire me at parties. But I held fast to my relationship with him. I was always faithful to him - I prided myself on it - and I couldn't see why he was insecure, why he doubted that, why he was always in a temper, always drinking, always shouting at me.

And then, of course, I fell in love. Not a transitory crush this time - this was the real thing. I fell in love with a beautiful young man who was sober, and industrious, witty without being outrageous, who was not a part of the fast set and, to some extent, held them in contempt. And it was a chaste relationship, with a few exchanged kisses, but quite desperately romantic ...

This was the song that was him, and I listened to it over and over again, on the worst nights crying at the sheer lonely beauty of it ...

In my dreams he was springtime, winter was cold.

How could I tell him what I so clearly could see?
Though I longed for him, another trusted me completely so I never could be free.

As my Finals drew to a close (my lover had been up in Oxford on the mid-exam weekend, had gone to a party and got drunk, managing to lose my exam gown that I had stupidly left with him), I realised I had to make a break. I arranged to stay in Oxford, not going to London as we had planned, and I ended the relationship.

Of course, the end of the story should be that my beautiful lover and I were finally united. But that never happened. Instead I drifted into the first of a series of desultory affairs that were to extend over the next few years. It was as though to have started a real relationship of the basis of that perfect summer romance was just impossible. Over the next few years, the people who would be important to me were a group of very bright friends of devastatingly savage wit. But that's another story.

Let's leave this with a paragraph I put in my earlier post about this ...

We walked home through the dawn once, and there was mist on the river. First up St Giles, with the colleges glowing under street lights, and the only sound being the clatter of milk vans making their early deliveries. We found a little iron fenced garden in the middle of a curved Regency terrace, and we walked along the paths in its shrubbery very early - and we picked small forget-me-nots and gave them to each other. Then we made out way to the river and walked through the silver mist till it turned golden in the light of the rising sun. Finally we walked back to the Victorian house where I lived, and he kissed me at the end of the road, because this was all a secret ...

I love Carmen. I love it in all shapes and forms. I love Carmen Jones. I love Peter Brook's idiosyncratic studio productions. I love it staged big and bold at an opera house with children marching on the stage imitating the soldiers, and Carmen strutting her stuff in a low-cut red dress. I love the exuberance of it, the passion of it, the tunefulness of it. I like my operas melodic - and not too sturm und drang-ie. So Wagner comes low down on the list, whereas almost any manifestation of Puccini is up there.

I took Greg to see the film of La Boheme with Carerras singing quite early on in our relationship. And he couldn't understand why I sat and sobbed my way through - not the Fourth Act or even the cruel parting in the Third - but the First Act.

"But why are you crying?" he wanted to know. "They've only just met - they're falling in love."

"I ... I know," I snivelled. "But they'll reprise this when she's dying!"

I love Britten operas too. The haunting Turn of The Screw, the absurd Peter Grimes (after all, when did child abuse ever make the sort of fatal flaw in a character than roused you to fear and pity rather than a sense of moral indignation?), and the wonderful Midsummer's Night's Dream, with its spooky fairies and the hilarious comic opera within the opera of the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe?

But Carmen was the first. I experienced it first through the orchestra where the two suites from the opera gave us percussionists the chance to do lots of inventive things with tambourines that had never figured in the Salvation Army's imaginings. Some of the tunes I seemed to have known forever in my life; I used the Toreador song as the basis for a parody in a dramatic school assembly that I staged in about the Third Form (each class staged one assembly per term and great was the competition). But I liked it so much that I actually saved my pocket money and bought the whole opera on records - six of them in a box set - Victoria de los Angeles, Nicolai Gedda and Sir Thomas Beecham conducting. I knew very little about opera then, but it was indeed one of the best recordings I could have bought. And I loved it and played it to death,

It was, perversely for a tragic opera, a great way of getting through teenage misery. I remember the first time I feel in love and was - three months later - unceremoniously dumped. I fled home to howl - and was faced with a choice of what to put on my bedroom stereo ... Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits? ("I am a rock, I am an iiiiiiii-sland") Or Victoria de los Angeles in full voice as Carmen and showing that wimp Don Jose what a real woman was? And by the time Carmen was strutting her stuff with her mate Lillas Pastia, I was leaping around on my bed like an early prototype for Bridget Jones, screaming out the words too.

Yes, Carmen was a slut who got hers in the end, but by golly she certainly lived too.

So raise the hem of the skirt a trifle, bare one shoulder, cast one long, sultry look in his (or her) general direction, and let me hear it ...

L'amour est enfant de Bohême,
il n'a jamais, jamais connu de loi,
si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime,
si je t'aime, prends garde à toi!

(Footnote to this - I googled for the lyrics as I couldn't remember all the French and discovered, to my amusement, that the writer of the quintessential Bridget Jones song - All By Myself - was, in fact, Eric Carmen. Just think how much better Bridget would have ended up feeling if she'd only explored just a little further along the Carmen shelf in the music store!)

For me, this is the quintessential children's song - and the favourite one from my childhood. You may not know it, but you can get a flavour of it either here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~carly/?M=A) or here.

There have been modern versions, but if you can, try and listen to the most famous recording, which was made by a child star of the 1950s called Mandy Miller. Unusually, she was associated with very serious, even tragic parts. She gave an outstanding performance in a film called Mandy about a deaf girl and how she is slowly taught to communicate. When she was eighteen, she retired, became an au pair in New York, married an architect and settled down to being a housewife and mother. What I love about the song particularly is the incredibly proper 1950s pronunciation, and also a certain wistful note she manages to put into the song. It should be a happy song, and yet I always, because of the way she sang it, found it terribly sad. She had a way with wist, that girl, possibly unmatched by any singer until Neil Tennant came along.

The song should be happy. Nellie is in a circus, a popular star who performs the tricks they have taught her. But then she hears the call of the wild, the head of the herd, and she slips her iron chain and heads off for the jungle finding, the song implies, true happiness there. In a way, I suppose, you could relate it to the way Mandy Miller herself turned her back on fame.

I always liked sad things when I was a child. Still do, actually - I'm hoarding 'Grave of the Fireflies' for sometime when I am feeling really miserable! But my favourite book of all was 'Ned the Lonely Donkey', a tale about a poor little lonely donkey who had no friends at all until the last page when he found, I think, a cute little foal to play with. I ignored the foal ending and just wallowed in the misery of Ned on his own.

I was a strange child. When taken out to buy toys, if I spotted one with a torn ear, or a twisted paw, I would always buy that one on the grounds that it was so sad because no-one else would want it. And the odd thing was, I would really, really want the lovely, perfect toy - but I would still buy the imperfect one because I couldn't bear the thought of its rejection.

I'm not sure whether this was just an overly developed sense of social justice at a ridiculously young age, or something to do with the fact that I was an only child. Admittedly, a very spoilt only child who was the focus of a extended family of loving adults.

I love Sibelius. I love his symphonies, his symphonic poems. I love the Karelia Suite and above all Finlandia.

I suppose I've got a bit of a weakness for nationalism in music - I also love early twentieth century English stuff - Elgar, Vaughn Williams and so on. And the work of the Czechs, the Russians - the way they all used their musical and cultural heritage. And, in Sibelius, the landscapes too.

This piece also reminds me of my time playing in the Hastings Schools Orchestra. I attended Hastings High School for Girls, a state-funded girls' grammar (in those days, grammar schools were for the bright students, while the rest went to the Secondary Moderns). The orchestra was a rare chance to draw together students from all the different senior schools, and boys and girls together as well (which was terrific, we thought). I played percussion - not, generally, the drums; there were two boys in our team who were tremendously good and generally did that. But the rest of us tended to play all the other stuff - the cymbals, bass drum, triangles, tambourines, maracas, timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone etc etc.

I had some good times with the orchestra. I remember one occasion in a village hall where there was a tall lamp with a particularly hideous pink shade on it right where we needed to set up the percussion session. We banished it to the backstage area, only to have it brought back by the caretaker who, moustaches quivering, assured us that it had played a part in every production ever staged in the hall and was not to be taken off-stage now. So we built the percussion section around it and wondered, amused, how they used it in different productions. 'King Lear' with pink lampshade might have been worth seeing.

Another time, I was playing the triangle in one of the pieces from Smetna's 'Bartered Bride' suite. It was a piece that open with a lovely, liquid solo by the oboe - which was punctuated by the triangle and went something like this ...

Dah dah dah {ting!} dah dah dah {ting!} dah de dah de dah {ting!} {ting!} {ting!}

Anyway, in the concert, the oboeist (a very glamorous student called Terry Palmer, who I had a huuge crush on) lifted the oboe to his lips and blew ... and his reed went. A squawk - and then he looked across helplessly at me.

That night the opening passage went ...

Squawk! {{silence}} {ting!} {{silence}} {ting!} {{siiiiilllllennce}} {ting!} {ting!} {ting!}

Once we did a show in France in a place called Bethune, which was twinned with Hastings (perhaps because both were located near famous battles). A grim place, we were accommodated at a boys' school. Our excellent conductor summoned the orchestra and informed us sternly that although the licensing laws in France were more relaxed than we were used to in England, on no account were we to get drunk (he glowered - long pause) before the performance.

And we were virtuous. We played the concert stone cold sober, and then hit the town afterwards. I remember people ending up back in our dormitory, sitting on the top of wardrobes drinking wine from the bottle and singing loudly. The following morning we were served a proper French college breakfast - which most people reacted to with unveiled suspicion. Only me and one other girl loved the wide broad handless bowls that we drank coffee from - gallons of coffee, real coffee. And the croissants - they seemed very foreign to the others, but we thought them scrumptious.

It's really strange to remember how limited British eating habits were when I was a gal.

The first piece by Sibelius that we tackled was the Karelia Suite. When the scores were handed out, there were shrieks of joy from the percussion and brass sections. We were old allies because the usual stars of the orchestra were the woodwind and strings. Usually we were just there to support them. But Sibelius gave percussionists the chance to make a lot of noise and the brass some fantastic starring tunes. The Intermezzo was also used as a theme for a popular TV current affairs programme, and we always loved playing music that the audience of parents and admirers would know and enjoy.

The Karelia Suite was a huge success and our conductor decreed that at our next concert we'd offer another piece of Sibelius, Finlandia. This, in addition to things to delight the brass and the percussionists, also had some wonderful passages for strings. For some reason I wasn't playing in this one, and I remember that one day, I made my way out of the rehearsal room to go to the loo. I came back just as they were launching into one of the strings-led passages, and I stood in the doorway for a moment, caught by the jaw-dropping, aching beauty of the passage. And the string section were playing wonderfully, the bows sweeping up and down in unison like waves on the water - it was a completely gorgeous sight and sound and the power of it brought a lump into my throat.

And that's why Finlandia is my choice for today.

When I was growing up, I had an uncle and aunt with whom I often stayed. She was my mother's only sister - a kind, funny and generous woman. She was impulsive - I think I recognise some of my best qualities from her. I made my own name for her, when I started learning French, and always called her 'Ma Tante'. When I was a little girl, and much spoiled by the pair of them, I thought everything was heavenly with them. It was only as I grew up that I realised that my uncle, for all his good humour, was a bigot and a drunk.

I believe that things were better when they were younger. My aunt used to talk nostalgically of holidays they went to when they were young, to Italy, which they both loved. That was pretty unusual, so after the war, it must have been - or the early 1950s. They always spoke with fondness of those holidays, although it didn't translate into, for example, a taste for Italian cooking. But it would have been hard to get the right ingredients in those days. The spaghetti of my childhood came in a Heinz can and was disgusting flaccid and slimy strings in the same tomato sauce that coated baked beans.

My uncle, in earlier days, played golf at the local golf club. He loved big cars and at one point owned a Jaguar. The other people at the golf club took to calling him the Duke of Ewell and, at the annual dinner, my aunt found herself one year called upon to present the prizes in her capacity of the Duchess of Ewell. So I think things were good in those early days.

It was as I became a teenager that I found myself having arguments more and more with my uncle. I was moving into left wing politics - but it wasn't just that. He seemed to despise anyone who was 'other' - immigrants among them, and young people in general - I was allowed to be an exception - but I was young enough to feel forced to respond to the constant jibes at my generation.

I think it was also the time when he was starting to drink more heavily. I remember he was the first person I ever saw drinking whisy chasers to accompany his beer. My grandmother had gone to live with them, and I think that put a great deal of pressure on them. She was old and frail and starting to do things like hiding food in her chair and her room, then forgetting all about it. I was present once when he lost his temper with her and it was awful - especially as I really wasn't used to adults shouting - my father was the most sweet-tempered of men, and my mother had a very even temper too.

The drinking got worse. I remember they were down one Christmas and he went to pour himself a drink. He took a large lager glass and filled it nearly to the brim with sherry - and then added a tot of whisky. My jaw dropped; my father, watching like me, just shook his head sadly and said, "Now you see."

The dangers of drink, he meant. And I did.

My aunt died first. She had a bad heart - it ran in my mother's side of the family - and she died soon after I graduated. My uncle died a few years later, a horrible death from peritonitis from a burst appendix. I think he was pretty much drunk all the time by then, as he was retired.

I came into some money from his Will. At that time, I had been involved in the peace movement for some years and hadn't had a proper holiday. I decided to go to Italy - really as a tribute to them, and to what they were in younger, happier days, before the drink ruined it all. So I booked a package holiday - 3 days in Florence, 4 days in Rome and a week in Sorrento. And, although it was a little lonely, I did have a wonderful time and fell deeply in love with Italy, especially Florence and Sorrento (Rome had some good bits, especially the Pantheon, but it was mostly a big city ... I might have enjoyed it more with Greg, although we've never been together. But Florence was so beautiful, so compact and so rich that one really didn't mind being alone. And Sorrento was super, for I went to Capri, Herculaneum, Amalfi and Ravello, and Pompeii.

I was determined to buy myself a souvenir, and there was some lovely marquetry in Sorrento. I decided on a music box - and found that there was one particular tune I liked. It was a few days before I discovered its name - Torna a Surriento or rather Come Back to Sorrento. And I did, a number of years later with Greg, and once again we had a terrific time.

So, to remember an aunt and uncle that I loved, at a time when they were happiest (before I was born though it was), to remember a place that I loved, I will listen to Torna a Surriento - not magnificently sung by Pavarotti (although you can hear him sing it wonderfully on the Three Tenors album), but heard as the tinkling notes of a music box, inviting me to come back to the most beautiful place once more.

Long entry this time - there's a lot to tell.

This is a Richard Thompson song and I mus confess that although I think he's an excellent songwriter, I am not great fan of his own singing, or, for that matter, of Linda Thompson's singing either. But a few weeks ago, there was a programme on the BBC of Richard Thompson covers and although many were very fine indeed (I loved the bluegrass version of "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" and Elanor Shanley's version of "Galway To Graceland"), the one that brought my heart into my throat was Roy Bailey's singing of Beeswing, from his album Coda.

Roy Bailey is an English folksinger, part of the socialist tradition of folksingers (like Ewann McColl) from the 1950s and 1960s. In the 2000 Honours List, he received the MBE for 'services to folk music'. He returned this award in August 2006 in protest at the government's foreign policy. Many of his songs reflect his beliefs and sympathies. He has the most magnificent voice. In 2001, he recorded what he expected to be his final album - Coda (hence the name). Fortunately for all his fans, he's made several more since then. But Coda is the one that contains his incomparable version of Beeswing.

To understand why it means so much to me, this time I think I need to give you the lyrics:

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So why this song?

It brings back memories for me, of the mid 1980s. I was in my twenties, with a good job in teaching, a motorbike, a nice flat and a cat. I was involved in campaigning against nuclear weapons (the Ground Launched Cruise Missiles, which were based at Greenham Common (and soon to be based at Molesworth). Not only was I involved in the campaigns, I was also starting to work as a journalist, writing articles for the New Statesman. I travelled around on my motorbike, travelling to protests, to peace camps - and it was at one of these that I met Paul. A classic troubled middle-class drop-out - he had got into trouble early on, and never really got out of it. He was living on the margins of society, and he was sassy and wise in the ways of the road. He was also witty and intelligent in an understated way. And he was also quite jaw droppingly good looking - he looked alarmingly like Richard Gere circa American Gigolo.

What drew us together? Well, you can see my reasons above. For him - I'm not so sure. I think he was attracted by my enthusiasm, and by what I was trying to do. I think he was flattered that I regarded him as more knowledgeable than me about some things, because he liked teaching me, and I liked learning. There was also the fact that I supplied him with a secure place to live - although that was not enough to hold him; the last time I saw him, he was happy enough back on the road. It was, indeed, not a long-lived affair; our lifestyles were too divergent. Beeswing reminds me of that summer we were together; he was the wild child, not as fine as a beeswing - but in a way, had I made other choices at that point, taking other paths, I might have travelled that road. As it is, it is a Road Not Taken in my life.

But while we were together, he opened my eyes to other possibilities - the life of people who took to the road and lived in battered old lorries, buses and vans, travelling from place to place, drifting from summer festival to summer festival, always being harassed by the police, being moved on as they looked for somewhere to over-winter. It led to me being in the right place to witness the Battle of the Beanfield, and to write an article for it for the New Statesman.

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But Beeswing reminds me of what still stands out in my mind as the strangest story from that time in my life.

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This song by the Cranberries brings back memories of a summer driving through France and Italy.

We were on a camping holiday, and it was actually very successful. It was back in the early days when J and her family were living in Switzerland, and for a few summers we tailored our holiday around a visit to them in Berne. One year we stayed in a villa in the French Alps; this year we camped, borrowing a large tent and a camping stove from rather more experienced friends. It was actually pretty civilised (once we learned to avoid French campsites that only had squattie loos, my absolute abomination). We travelled with everything we could possibly need.

The first night was a little grim, a rather primitive camp in the middle of a forest. But the next night we camped on the banks of a little river in the Vosges , and that was gorgeous, for the air was clean and fresh and we bought fresh bread and croissants from the little camp shop. Then on to Berne, and a few days at the flat, before we headed for Italy and Lake Garda. Our car radio no longer picked up the English stations, so we listen to French radio - I wanted news of the Tour de France too. The news on the hour had two stories - Bosnia, and Hugh Grant being caught with a prostitute. The newsreader would be speaking solemnly one minute about the war - and then suddenly we would hear the words 'ooo Grant, and realise that the story had shifted. And then the news would finish and - as often as not - we'd hear Dolores O'Riordan impassioned singing, "With their tanks and their guns and their bombs and their guns, they are fight-ing ... " and we would talk, in slow bursts of conversation, about the strangeness of being aware that there was a mainland war in Europe after forty years of peace. And it was a war, for although the song was about Northern Ireland, that was a conflict that killed by ones and twos and tens ... but in the summer of 1995, people in Bosnia would die in their thousands.

And, of course, we were driving closer towards it.

Lake Garda was beautiful. We spent one night on the campsite we had planned to stay at, and realised it was too big and family orientated for us. So the next day we drove around to the other side of the lake and found a small campsite just outside Moniga del Garda. They gave us a perfect pitch, right on the lake frontage, and we stayed there a week, wandering up through the olive grove to buy sugary Italian croissants for breakfast every morning, which we'd wash down with strong black coffee. We went out sight-seeing most days (and I strongly - nay, strenuously - recommend Gabriele d'Annunzio's villa to all true students of kitsch. The website isn't a bad example, either). Then we set off to drive back via France to the UK.

And again on the radio we heard the news of the war, which was coming to a head. The Serbs were threatening the safe enclave of Srebrenica, and again and again we heard Zombie played, like a warning beat of the horror that was soon to come.

So for me, that summer of 1995 will be marked by the memories of the camping and the walks through the olive groves in the early morning, and one night watching a spectacular thunderstorm over the lake, and behind it all the sense of gathering horror, played out to the sound of Zombie.

There's a great version of this by the local folk group Magpie Lane, but for me the definitive version will always be Martin Cathy singing it on his first album (simply called Martin Carthy), and recorded way back in the 1960s. A young, strong voice - it still has that quality of strengthbut is an older voice now and richly skilled.

It's not a pure folksong. It was originally written for a play called 'A Joviall Crew', written by Richard Brome and performed in 1641, reputedly the last play staged in London before the Puritans closed the theatres during the English Civil War. I've seen a modern version performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Max Stafford Clarke.

For me, the song is tied up with gaming.

My first attempts at roleplay were the classic online thing - IRC chatrooms. I'd heard of good games being run of Austnet, so I visited there to find out. Quite a lot of it was what you would expect (very ably satirised in the early editions of Elf Only Inn) - a lot of hanging around in 'inns' waiting for something to happen - and sometimes it did, and it was fun. Eventually, I fell in with a group of role-players who were rather good and creative and who essentially played a bunch of low-life rogues with wit and some charm. I hung out with them for a while, before moving on to pbems.

For me, the song brings back memories of early freeform roleplaying and generally hanging out with a nice bunch of people. It still makes me smile.

This goes back a long way in my life.

I was nineteen and up at Oxford for my entrance interview. I'd taken the special Oxbridge exam, and I'd got through to the interview stage (to give you an idea, it was five years since anyone from our school had got into Oxford or Cambridge; of the nine who had done the exam, I think four of us got interviews). I went up and stayed overnight in a room I was allocated. I had some friends (male) from the local grammar school who had got in a couple of years earlier; two of them had very sweetly descended and taken me out for a drink. But now I was back in St Anne's College, in the room I had been given. I had read the book I'd brought with me (The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh - I'd been warned a popular question was "What are you reading at the moment?" and it was best to have a response that suggested intelligence without being pretentious). And now I was ready for bed, and terribly, terribly nervous about the interview ...

And then, as I lay in bed, I heard it. A flute - someone practising - or perhaps playing it on a record player. It was very clear - not in the room but close. Faure's Pavane, liquid notes of stately elegance.

I got up, and the music still sounded, faint but clear on the cold night air. I went to the door and opened it, hoping to find out where it was coming from. But it was fainter in the corridor outside and, I discovered, the place to hear it best was in my room, was lying in the narrow little college bed. So I went back to bed.

And as I listened to it, I suddenly felt a deep certainty that the interview would be successful, that I would get in to Oxford. It was a tremendously reassuring moment.

And it was, of course, quite correct.

Since then, I have heard the music several times on different occasions - and it has always been lucky for me. I've heard it before certain job interviews, before important meetings. It's rarely as mysterious as it was that night - it might be on the radio, and once it was a busker on an underground station. For the blessing of our wedding you might say of course I heard it because I'd asked the organist to play it among the pieces he would play while people were coming into the church.

But I still think it's part of this strange association that I have with the Pavane that it should be the piece that was being played as I arrived at the church.