Big Tim, my apologies, I missed your earlier question. (Am I the only one who finds reading from a screen difficult?) The guilty party is myself. In a sense. The line "Hang out your brightest colours" is borrowed from a letter that George Bernard Shaw wrote to Collins' sister after his death. Actually he wrote "Hang up.." It's a beautiful piece of work. And a woman told me that at least a couple of bars of the melody are taken from a Mozart aria. That borrowing was unconscious. But if you're going to steal you may as well steal from geniuses.

Thank for your generous use of the word "excellent". A friend once praised this song, talking about construction, conciseness and so on. He concluded by saying, "But it must have been very difficult to write a song while sitting on a fence".