Remembrance of things Proust

Eat your heart out Marcel. Did he ever hear a bit of music on a BBC4 trail and get taken back forty years? Course not. It was all flowers and smells with him. Common as muck.

But for me the BBC have brought back my youth (and he told me he had only gone out to buy some chips). With a bit of Davy Graham on their trail for Folk Britannia: Angi no less. Though they never tell you that.

It was the piece of music I had my first snog to. With Marjorie, above the chemists in Harpenden. With her parents in the back room. We were in the front, and I was trying to get into her front. And trying, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to work out how you manage to find someones lips when you've got your eyes shut. I can sympathise with David Blunkett. Anyway I missed, and had to pretend I had meant to all along. That I was working up to a big finish, well she was a big girl.

We went out for about three weeks after that. I got the bus across from St Albans and we went down to Harpenden Public Hall. It was just around the corner from the chemists and I was too young to drive anyway. To see Zoot Money and the Big Roll Band, and the Bow Street Runners - winners of the Melody Makers Poll in case you've forgotten.

In three weeks we spoke about a dozen words to each other. Neither knowing what to say. I might have been her first boyfriend too, though she did know about tongues.

Somehow we drifted apart, though I don't think anything was said. I saw her a year or two later at a party on a farm. But I didn't know what to say then either, so I didn't say it.

And it was all down to Davy Graham and Angi, which is so unutterably boring that you have to find someone to snog just to take your mind of it.