Making The Transition

[poliphilo]

As we drove north the skies grew cloudier- just as they're supposed to do.

We were listening in the car to Ewen MacColl and Peggy Seeger singing their home-made protest songs of the Ban The Bomb era- none of which  have aged well. That sort of thing is best left to the Americans, I think. However- among the clinker- there's Shoals of Herring- which is a damn fine piece of trad folk and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face- which is deathless.

There were election leaflets behind the door- all mixed up with the flyers for takeaways. The Labour Party has posted six and the Liberals, Greens, BNP and UKIP have posted one apiece, The Tories haven't bothered: sensible of them.

This is a cold house in winter, but delightfully cool in summer.

There were kids playing in the street last night. One poor lad had been deprived of his jacket- and his loving friends and relations were trying to lodge it on top of our hedge. That's something you don't get at my mother's.

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Did you know Ewan MacColl's real name was Jimmy Miller?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I didn't, but I'm not surprised. I knew he was less Scottish than he wanted people to think.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

He wasn't Scottish at all- he was English, but let that pass........

[craftyailz.livejournal.com]

He tells you about it in one of the songs he does, his father was (I think) Scottish but was always at the front of disputes in the mills in which he worked. So when the dispute was over he invariably got his cards and they'd move on to another town with mills in Scotland, the North East and finally ended up in Salford. There they settled - everyone was probably as argumentative as he was - and that was where they stayed and James Henry Miller was born and grew up to be Ewan MacColl

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

The complexities of our island races! I'm English with Scottish ancestry and the hub is Scottish with English ancestry!

My grandads were Communists and union men which is how I got to be born a Maid of Kent- they came here to work the pits having got themselves blackballed by the owners up north after the '26 strike.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

One of the discs we've been listening to is a collection of street songs- performed by Dominic Behan and Ewen MacColl- drawn from their childhood experiences in Dublin and- ahem- Glasgow.

Another is a collection of songs by Burns in which MacColl comes across as very, very Scots.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Something else that winds other half up is what he memorably terms 'Guildford Celts.'