'Billy Weeks would probably know...' I'd like to pretend that is so Steve, but my filing system (very simple: everything is on the floor somewhere) relied heavily on my memory and that is getting extremely dodgy now. But this gives me the opportunity to add my own few words of appreciation of John Foreman. When I joined the EFDS in the 1950s, expressing a taste for music hall songs in the precincts of CSH was like letting a loud fart in church. My first hearing of John (I think it was in a pub singing room in Clerkenwell) persuaded me that the old songs of my own London background were not, after all, dismissable commercial junk.

I was old enough to have heard the likes of Harry Champion,Nat Travers and Nellie Wallace on stage in the dying days of variety, but I had thought it was all over until I heard John's amazing repertoire. In the last two or three years, I have also had the joy of hearing him sing at a Broadside Day at CSH. The audience response was terrific. Times have truly changed at the old cathedral. The VWML itself now takes popular song, in print and on record, as an essential contextual strand in the study of folk song.

I have owned two copies of John's splendid re-creation of 'Curiosities of Street Literature'. One of them is now in the library of a friend in Rhode Island. I hope he will eventually be able to paste in a copy of 'The Last Dying Confessions of Donald Trump'.