I'm an admirer of Castro, if you include our shared interest in tropical fish... After that, his reliance on kangaroo courts, summary executions and oppression through enforced poverty tend to get in the way of shared ideals.

Ditto Stalin, really. It seems you can say you admired Stalin but are kept at arms length if you say you like Hitler, yet you couldn't separate them with a crowbar in terms of the harm to the reputation to humanity they equally represent. Or indeed their motives and methods.

Rather revealing really.

The bit about "I don't like Mondays" is interesting. A song about an event that questions the state of the society it was based in. It has been played in folk clubs as a representative song of society ever since Bob Geldof wrote it. Here's a bit of trivia for you. Elvis Costello's first ever professional paid gig was at a folk concert, opening for Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. I have been playing his "Veronica" at folk clubs for the last thirty odd years, and that, together with the many who sing "I don't Like Mondays" are an excellent example of...

The living folk tradition that MacColl spoke of. (Including within the two interviews he gave me for a syndicated radio show in 1981 and 1985. He spoke eloquently about how folk music is about an ideal rather than a style and in the second interview mentioned Geldof's song as one that will help future generations understand the late c21. Other than that, and being a floor turn during one of the folk club nights within that, my personal knowledge was confined to those two nights, although I have done studio work with their Calum in more recent years.)

Like MacColl's own work, acknowledging that folk music includes capturing events and what that tells us about those around at the time flies in the face of the tit trousered old codgers who refer to the 1954 nonsense.

Some say good old Jim. Some say f