We don't want the aliens to think we're idiots

One morning this week little (no longer at all little) Philou asked me: 

'Dad, what's a parsec?'

Our conversations often begin like this, a subject coming out of the blue.

'It's a unit of distance', I said, delighted to have one of those increasingly rare moments with my children to show off my brilliance. 'A parsec is a few light years.'

This is the sort of topic I geek out on.

'You're wrong Dad, 'cos in Star Wars they use it to talk about time', he replied.

Well that can't be right. So we dug out the wikipedia article where it says plainly that a parsec is a unit of distance, and also that it's used incorrectly as a time unit in the first Star Wars film.

'So why do we need parsecs if we have light-years?', Philou continued.

'Well', I replied, 'if we were to meet aliens in a distant star system and tried to explain where we came from using light-years, they'd just think we were idiots!'

Imagine the conversation as humans encounter an alien on a faraway planet.

'We come in peace', our earthling spacemen might say.

'Cool! Where exactly do you come from?', the aliens might ask.

'Oh, a blue planet called Earth, a few light-years that way', we'd reply. 'You know, the distance light travels in a year'.

'The speed of light, gotcha', the aliens would say. 'That's a universal constant. But what's a year?'

Well that is indeed the killer question alright.

'A year is how how long it takes our planet Earth to orbit our sun. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so every 4th year is 1/365th longer, called a leap year. But we don't use light-leap-years. Well actually we don't use years to measure light-years at all, we use metres per second. A metre is how far light travels in 1/1299792458th of a second. Seconds are 1/86400th of a day - a day is the time it takes our planet to rotate once on its axis. Well sort of, it actually takes a bit longer than that so we have leap seconds. So we've redefined a second as the ground state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom which in hertz is 9192631770 when...'

'Oh you guys are idiots!", interrupt the exasperated aliens. "How did you ever find your way here at all'.

And that's why we have parsecs. All our alien needs to understand is the concept of a circle and a little trigonometry, both probably understood by any intelligent life form, and then we can tell him how far away earth is in parsecs.

A parsec is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one arcsecond.

Like this:

How cool is that? (OK so there's teeny bit more complexity - see the parsec wikipedia article - but still!)

If you must know, a parsec is around 3.26 lightyears - but let's not go there again.

Roddy Lumsden, 1966 - 2020

Many years ago I searched the internet for famous Lumsdens. There weren't many. But I found a Scottish poet, Roddy. How likely was it that this relatively unknown poet I'd found was any good?

He was brilliant. Poems of dazzling wit and wordplay. And then I heard him read aloud in soft Scottish tones, and I loved his work even more. Over time he became quite celebrated, appearing on BBC radio, referenced by other poets as an influence on them.

Around 2014 he disappeared from public view. Finally I saw him again in a YouTube video giving a reading of new work in 2017, looking haggard and old beyond his years, though his new poems were as vibrant as always.

He died last month, just 53 years old.

His poem "The Young", an ode to youth that catches the breath, is so poignant now.

One cartwheel over the quicksand curve 
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you’re gone, 
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

He reads it beautifully here, in a recording that I hope never ever disappears from the internet. 

RIP Roddy.

Austerlitz, again

It's the book to which I continually return. I'm often aware of it swirling around in my mind like music, below the level of my consciousness, sombre and profound as a cello concerto.

Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald

Sebald died in a car crash just a month after his masterpiece was published in November 2001. So when we come to its end there is nothing more. The rest is, literally, silence. Unless we return to its beginning, which I do every few years.

Impossible to summarise but I'll try anyway. Jacques Austerlitz, 4 years old, is evacuated from Nazi-controlled Prague on a Kindertransport, never to see his Jewish parents again. His new life is in Wales, raised by a Calvinist preacher, his Jewish identity and all traces of his earlier life overwritten. Only when middle-aged does he come to realise what happened to him and sets off on a search for his former life. That's the plot, such as it is. It's also a book about monstrous buildings in old European cities, their architecture and morality, about the connection between mental illness and authenticity, about friendship and the barriers that prevent us individuals from truly understanding each other. And above all it's about the Holocaust, a shadow that darkens all time and every space, yet only seen obliquely. Sebald said: 

I've always felt that it was necessary above all to write about the history of persecution, of  vilification of minorities, the attempt well nigh achieved to eradicate a whole people. And I was, in pursuing these ideas, at the same time conscious that it's practically impossible to do this, to write about concentration camps [...] so you need to find ways of convincing the reader that this is something that is on your mind, but that you do not necessarily roll out on every other page  

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

That quote comes from a remarkable audio interview with Sebald that was recorded in those last four weeks of his life after the publication of his masterpiece. I found it by chance, and was delighted to hear him speak in sentences as sonorous as his prose.

Sebald is asked about the significance of the moths that feature in several scenes and he refers to a description of dying moths in a work by Virginia Woolf. He says:

[...] her description of a moth, coming to its end, on a window pane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, written somewhere chronologically speaking between the battle fields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. And there is no reference to the battle fields of the Somme in this passage but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people's souls, the souls of those who got away and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite some way from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern

[from Bookworm Dec 6, 2001 Hosted by Michael Silverblatt]

Virginia Woolf is another author to whom I often return, to her novel Mrs Dalloway in particular, and certain similarities between Woolf and Sebald struck me in this interview. They both weave a novel around an "undeclared concern", seeing it obliquely from a perspective that adds to our understanding of it, shining a light on the seemingly trivial to show that it is anything but. And they do this with prose that is delicate and precise, and so sharp it catches you off-guard and cuts deep.

Each time I read Austerlitz it is a different part of it that leaves the greatest impression on me. I've been haunted by the images of the wide-eyed creatures of the Nocturama at the Antwerp Zoo, and the story of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt where Jacques' mother Agata was interned.  Somehow it was only on my most recent reading that I was struck by the story of Jacques' best friend, Gerald Fitzpatrick, at whose home Jacques often stayed and whose passion for flying leads to his death, an event that he and we can see on the horizon long before it arrives. Gerald is of Irish stock, and the opening of Yeat's poem "An Irish Airman foresees his Death" fits him well:

I know that I shall meet my fate  

Somewhere among the clouds above;  

Those that I fight I do not hate,  

Those that I guard I do not love;

At the novel's conclusion Austerlitz takes his leave of the narrator to continue his search and, in the novel's compressed time where past and present mingle, it seems to me that he may still be searching now, wandering amongst the brooding train stations and fortresses of old Europe that have borne witness to such terrible times.

In another interview Sebald recounted how he had watched a documentary about a real Kindertransport child, Susi Bechhöfer, and used some elements of her story in his novel. She was adopted by a Calvinist minister in Wales and only re-discovered her origins as an adult. She suffered appalling abuse from her step family and her biography is a harrowing read, though most of her story is quite different from that of the fictional Austerlitz. She was unhappy that Sebald used elements of her life in his novel, but his death prevented her from making that known to him.

Perhaps Susi Bechhöfer felt that her identity had been stolen from her for a second time, and that's a thought that upsets me. I felt that on behalf of Sebald the least I could do was to buy her biography and place it on my bookshelf next to my prized first US edition of Austerlitz. So when I next pick up Austerlitz I will also think of Susi, imagine her to life again, and think of her as the person, the little girl, she spent a lifetime seeking.

Rosa's Child: One Woman's search for her Past
by Jeremy Josephs and Susi Bechhöfer

Parenting milestones

I used to hold my children's hands when they crossed the road. It was a brief stage in our lives together, dad and child. Only a short time they could go to the park without me. Now it's been a long time since I held their hands in mine. 

I used to read them bedtime stories, sometimes the same story on a hundred nights, until they could read for themselves. I still know every word of "The Gruffalo" off by heart, but they only dimly remember it, if at all.

These were parenting milestones: my children developing their own skills, becoming independent. At the time, these milestones passed by without me noticing. I don't remember the very last time I held T's hand to cross the road, or the last night I read P a bedtime story. If I had known in the precise moment, that it was the last time, I would have been blinking away tears. It was definitely better for my mental health that I only saw the milestone afterwards when looking back. 

Today I signed T up for another summer of soccer, just like I've done every year in the past decade. But I didn't sign L up, as he's over 18 now. Last Autumn, as his team progressed through the championship, I knew that when the season ended I would no longer be bringing him to matches around Montreal, watching him play, cheering him on, shouting at the referee that he'd been fouled. His final underage game was on a Sunday morning in September, and in the warm Autumn sunshine I had a lump in my throat and blinked away a few tears as we celebrated winning the Montreal U18A regional championship. His last game of underage soccer, my last day as his biggest fan. The milestone was right there, looming over me.

I love being a Dad but some moments are bittersweet.

This morning L said he might want to be a referee this Summer. Maybe I'll follow him around, if he'll let me, show my appreciation for the referee when he makes the right call for offside. The referee's biggest fan. 

P.S. And then the pandemic happened and some milestones were missed, never to be seen again.

Aftermath and beforemath

• Time's Arrow by Martin Amis
  
• Motoring as Metaphor by Rachel Cusk
  
• The Pianist of Willesden Lane by Mona Golabek, as performed at the Segal Centre, September 2019

The metaphorical "time's arrow" flies backwards in the novel by Amis. We begin at the end, and end at the beginning. It's clever and expertly executed: food comes out of mouths to be arranged neatly on plates, babies return to their wombs, and the principal character youths (unages?) back through his life. We start with his death, and fast reverse through his old age, then the silver-haired honorable phase of his medical career, back to his mid-life crisis, than to young adulthood where we arrive in a dreadful place. For it soon becomes clear that we will pass through the Holocaust, when the venerable doctor, now a young Nazi medic in Auschwitz, will reconstitite families from piles of twisted corpses.

Why does Amis go to the trouble of telling the story in reverse? Well one reason might be to showcase his brilliance, I suppose, but the reverse exposition had a profound effect on me: I turned each page with an intensifying and terrible dread. The crimes were committed in the medic's youth in the few years of the war. His long life afterwards was an aftermath, a war criminal whose assumed identities never erase who he is. By telling his story in reverse we spend almost all of the novel swimming back through the chill aftermath, our despair growing as we know where we will inevitably end: at the very beginning of the horror. It's not a page turner but it's quite unforgettable.

In Rachel Cusk's essay "Motoring as Metaphor" she recounts an incident involving an elderly driver where, though time's arrow flies in its usual direction, the end changes everything that came before. Cusk writes:

A few years ago a woman of 94 killed a girl of 10 at a pedestrian crossing. There have doubtless been a number of such incidents, but this one has stayed in my mind. One reason, I suppose, has to do with narrative, with the fact that the meaning of this woman's life was entirely altered by a single event at its end: this is not how stories generally work. Since she had already lived an unusually long life I wondered whether the woman wished she had died before killing the girl

Knowing how her story ends causes us to see her 94 years as the lead-up to a tragedy. Effectively that's how Amis is telling his story too, a horror story whose end/beginning changes everything.

Amis tells us the story of a perpertrator, whereas it's the long aftermath of the victims that is the story told by Mona Golabek. A classical pianist, as was her mother who escaped Vienna for London on a kindertransport in 1938, destined to never see her parents again. She grew up in London; they were murdered in Auschwitz. The thread that binds her story is music as she plays the pieces her grandmother taught her mother, Grieg's piano concerto foremost amongst them, echoing down the years of the aftermath. Each piece is as beautiful as when it was first played but each is also changed forever for having passed through those times in the minds of the victims: the dead and their descendants. As we listen to the story and the music, told and played beautifully by Golabek, we are still very much in the aftermath of the horrors, 71 years later.

Another Autumn

It's the most photogenic time of the year in Quebec and through many Autumns I've tried to capture it; the twist in this year's photo is that little (no longer so little) Philou is dressed in colours that almost exactly matched the landscape.

Recent Readings

If you only like novels with a strong plot then move along, there's nothing like that to be seen here.  But I really enjoyed all of these books in the past months, and a week in Cuba meant I'd a lot of extra reading time.

A trilogy by Rachel Cusk: Outline, Transit, Kudos
The three novels are an exploration of the theme given in each title, in the context of relationships forming, changing and ending. Our viewpoint is that of a mother of 2 children, a writer living in England who has gone through a bitter divorce. We hear very little about her directly; instead she relates her conversations with her students, other authors, ex-lovers, strangers on a plane, all told in her own voice and vocabulary, which to my ear echoes Virginia Woolf (of whom more below). Her character emerges at the boundaries of these interactions.

Now that might sound a bit stiff and dull, but what makes the novels work so well is the quality of that authors voice and the depth of the conversations - Cusk brings our attention to the minute details of our interactions with others and dives deep for nuggets of insight. Or as one of the character says:

Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.

I was hooked from the very first page and read the three books one after another, though they won't be everyone's cup of earl grey. 

Albert Camus: L'Étranger
Kamel Daoud: Meursault, contre-enquête
There's nothing I can say about L'Étranger, one of the most renowned books of the 20th century, that hasn't already been said. I enjoyed it and improved my French too. The novel by Daoud is a riposte to it, centred on "l'arabe" who is murdered by the eponymous "l'étranger" Meursault . In Camus' work we learn nothing about this victim, not even his name; he is irrelevant to Meursault and to Camus, and his murder is meaningless. In Daoud's novel we learn that he was named Moussa, and that the lives of his mother and brother were changed forever by his murder. The killing is then put in to context of pre-independence Algeria and how the "pieds noirs" were viewed at that time. Then we enter a mirror image of the Camus story where one of the pied noir, a Frenchman, is murdered by Moussa's brother in an act of revenge that is also meaningless. It's an innovative and enjoyable read, though my level of French is insufficient for me to have an opinion on how well-written it is.

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
I've read and re-read this book many times, sometimes just dipping in for a few pages at a time. It's so rich and wise and the prose is so beautiful I'll never be finished with it.

Mr O'Reilly

Mr. O'Reilly was old. I was 10, and for as long as I could remember he'd always been the same: black bushy hair and eyebrows and moustache, a well worn black suit and waistcoat, his pipe with which he constantly fiddled as he leaned on the garden gate outside his terraced house, watching the traffic on our busy road. He smelled of tobacco. From four houses away I could smell it, not unpleasant in itself, but for me a warning: Mr O'Reilly is out.

For he had a gruff manner, as though continually affronted by what he saw from his observation post at the end of his little overgrown garden. And he'd a loud and gravelly voice to complement his imposing dark figure and mannerisms. On my daily errand to buy the final edition of the Evening Herald, I had to pass him. Each time the blood would be pounding in my ears. Could I sneak by quickly without him talking to me?

'The state of that car it should be put off the feckin road!'

Oh no. Should I pretend I hadn't heard him, or just smile back, or what? Oh God!

'What?', he'd bark.

"You're right Mr O'Reilly", I'd stammer.

'Huh', he'd retort, severely unimpressed with my limp response.

I'd continue on up the road, turning right to cross at the traffic lights, taking Sally's bridge over the Grand Canal and on down to Kelly's newsagent, all the while fretting over my return journey and how to avoid Mr. O'Reilly.

But there was no avoiding Mr. O'Reilly.

'The Guards should do something about it but they're feckin useless.'

Oh no. He'd mentioned the Guards. What should I reply? Didn't Mam say one of his sons was arrested by the Guards? Is that the fella that was always coming home roaring drunk from the pub, or one of the other rough looking ones?

'What did ye say?' he'd shout.

'Eh, you're right Mr. O'Reilly', I'd offer.

'Huh'.

I tried various tactics. Instead of walking past him up to the traffic lights I'd cross the road outside my house; I'd often be standing at the edge of the road for an eternity, waiting for a gap in the traffic, feeling his eyes boring into my back. I'd take our little dog with me, so that I could take her off the leash at the traffic lights on the way back and race with her past Mr O'Reilly before he could say anything; he'd watch me the whole way, as I kept my eyes facing forward to avoid his gaze. He knew what I was doing.

I don't know when he stopped being there. I remember one evening much later, back for a visit after a couple of years abroad, I passed him at his gate without either of us speaking. He looked frail, probably didn't recognise me.

He's not there anymore. It's not the same place without him. 

Mr O'Reilly was here

Tender...

Jim Harrison's "Bridge" is one of the poems I learned off by heart a few years ago. His description of the sea reminds of the times I spent camping in Co. Wexford as a little boy with my family, stormy dark nights when the wind tore at the tent, the rain machine-gunned the canvas, and the sea thundered a baseline to the cacophony. 

Sometimes the sea roars and howls like 

the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.

What beauty in this the darkest music 

over which you can hear the lightest music of human 

behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.

from Bridge by Jim Harrison 

Under a wide and starry night sky I too have felt a connection with the galaxies that sprawl to a horizon a billion light-years away. But the word "tender" intervenes like a note from a different key, intimate and melancholy in the midst of a grand symphony. I don't really understand precisely why the connection might be tender, but I do love the music created by that surprising little phrase.

Reading in bed late one night last week, I heard the same note when that word "tender" showed up in a very different piece.

Comme si cette grande colère m'avait purgé du mal, vidé d'espoir, devant cette nuit chargée de signes et d'étoiles, je m'ouvrais pour la première fois à la tendre indifférence du monde.

from L'étranger by Albert Camus 

Merseault, the eponymous "l'étranger" (best translated as "outsider") of Camus' masterpiece, is expressing the opposite emotion, the stars opening his eyes to the "tender" indifference of the world, rather than its connection with him. But the effect is similar, a note of intimacy and melancholy is struck in this tumultuous last movement of the novel.

I wonder if this resonance only sounds for me or if Harrison deliberately planted it there?  

Ireland is boilin'

This week in Ireland we have the hottest weather in 42 years. The roads are melting (literally) and we're running out of water (literally). In short, as the woman at the checkout in Supervalu said to me, it's boilin' outside (metaphorically). The TV news shows pictures of beaches filled with Irish sunbathers turning the colour of, yes, boiled lobsters.

But when Mam and I went for a walk in Newcastle Co. Wicklow we found the beach deserted, with a deliciously cool breeze coming off the Irish sea.

We walked a few 100 metres beside the railway lane and passed this forlorn abandoned cottage, slumped in the heat, under dazzling blue skies stretching westwards to the Wicklow mountains

I rather like this heated up Ireland, especially because I know it'll be cold and wet again soon enough.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

I'm delighted to see this novel get the recognition it merits: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack has just won the International Dublin literary award. I read it last year on the back of a strong review in the Irish Times, and it's one of the very few books which I've turned around and read again as soon as I finished it (Austerlitz by W.G.Sebald being the only other in recent times).

The recent reviews and indeed the blurb on the back of the paperback all give the reader a piece of information about the novel's main character and narrator which in my opinion you would be better off not knowing. I read it on my Kindle and didn't have this information, so I found the first half of the book a bit disorienting and eerie - it was wonderful!

I’ve lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land
   through hail and gale
   hell and high water
men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers many of them

The other thing you'll hear in any review is that the book is written as one long sentence, which is factually true but misleading. There is a lot of punctuation, just no full stops, and there are obvious pauses and changes of perspective. The quality of the writing is of an uncommonly high standard in its tone and lyricism. It's not a difficult read, quite the contrary it's extremely engaging but demanding of your full attention.

The opening of the novel is pure poetry. In fact as I re-read it now it causes another poem to echo in my mind.

the bell
  the bell as
  hearing the bell as
    hearing the bell as standing here
    the bell being heard standing here
    hearing it ring out through the grey light of this
    morning, noon or night
    god knows
    this grey day standing here and
    listening to this bell in the middle of the day,
 the middle of the day bell, the Angelus bell in the middle of the day

The sounds and repetitions in those opening lines reminds me of the last poem written by Samuel Beckett "What is the word" 

folly –
folly for to –
for to –
what is the word –
folly from this –
all this –
folly from all this –
given –
folly given all this –
seeing –
folly seeing all this –
this –
what is the word –
this this –
this this here –

Hmm, has anyone else noticed this echo?

"Dad, you're like a kid in a toy shop!"

And he was right, my middle son, I was indeed like a kid in a toy shop. We were at the Canadian Grand Prix, walking around the track towards the exit after the second Formula 1 practice as my son had had enough for the day, but I'd stopped to watch the Formula Ford 1600's, my face pressed up against the fencing to get a better view of those spindly little cars. Forty-five (and more) years ago in Dublin the simple FF 1600 class was the showpiece of the Phoenix Park motor races - we could only dream of seeing F1 cars. Then it was my own Dad who was the kid in the toy shop and who couldn't leave until the last race was won - by which time I'd be bursting to take a pee and would have to run for a slash behind a tree. Bit of a Dublin tradition that, luckily there are a lot of trees in the Phoenix Park and hopefully by now some toilets too!

Things are a bit more sophisticated in Montreal in 2018: decent though expensive food, clean toilets (sinks! soap!), and the F1 cars are spectacular. I also played with the shutter speed of my camera in a reasonably successful attempt to get blur-free picture of the cars as they ripped past us.

Memories are made of days like these.

I am another you

I am He, He is me,

if You only knew

He is another you

         - Dylan Olsen

"I am another you" is a documentary about 22 year old Dylan Olsen, living on streets in Florida, a situation he has apparently chosen and is content with. Dylan is articulate and charismatic. Passers-by often engage and help him, in contrast with the treatment of other indigents. The Chinese documentary-maker Nanfu Wang is fascinated by Dylan and by his absolute freedom, a contrast with her experiences growing up in a repressive China. However all is not as it seems.

I loved this documentary when I first saw it on PBS, sitting in solitude in a business hotel on a recent trip to Ottawa. I watched it again last Friday with my family - it's available on Amazon Prime - and it sparked several dinner conversations between us. It's a story of freedom, of the implications that can come from simple decisions, and of mental illness. My eldest son pointed out that it's also a story of how fathers and sons relate to each other and, worryingly, that's true too.

I hope for the best for Dylan wherever he is now but, typically, I fear for the worst.

Five went to Baie-Saint-Paul

I took this selfie of us in the afternoon sunshine beside the bay.

Baie-Saint-Paul, November 2017

Biography of a song: Miss Otis Regrets

Cole Porter wrote Miss Otis Regrets in 1934 as a humorous parody of those mournful old folk songs about young girls who've been tricked by an immoral man into "losing their virtue". In the song the eponymous Miss Otis is seduced and defiled, then shoots her seducer dead, is arrested, dragged off by an angry mob, and hanged, all within a single day! The twist in Porter's tale is that Miss Otis is not a poor young girl but a society lady, and it's a butler who communicates her regrets that, due to the unforeseen circumstances of having been hanged, she will be unable to lunch with Madam today.

This clip from the 1946 movie "Night & Day" is the song as Porter wrote it, with Madam clearly not enjoying the bawdy humour.

The song took on a life that Porter could not have imagined. It's been sung as a genuine cowboy ballad (by Lonnie Donegan), as a jazz standard (Ella Fitzgerald), as a tragic torch song (Linda Rondstadt), as an Irish folk song (The Pogues) and as a German cabaret tear-jerker (Marlene Dietrich ... seriously!). Even Édith Piaf has had a go. I listened to more than 20 versions of it on Tidal yesterday, drawing a line only when it came to the Brazilian orchestra doing a Bossa Nova rendition.

It seems to be a song that is infinitely malleable, a precious metal that can be endlessly re-worked into a delicate new bijou. The melody is catchy, the lyrics are striking, but it's the repetition of "Madam" that lends a strange quality to it and allow singers to make it their own, through sideways glances that can be witty, coy, plaintive, heart-rending and more.

Here are the four recordings that I most enjoyed, with my absolute favourite being the one Kirsty MacColl did on the BBC's New Year's Eve show in 1995, accompanied by an army band with bagpipes and drums.

• Ella Fitzgerald
• Édith Piaf
• Marlene Dietrich - who changed the lyrics but the nasty man still gets killed!
• Kirsty: