And interestingly, in view of his sometimes spiky opinions of fellow performers, he contributed to Folk Review some rather generous albums reviews of The Spinners and The Corries.

Here's a wee follow-up anecdote to my posting about Greer Gilman's Moonwise. The story behind this was that PB picked up the book on his final US tour – the author was a friend of The Watersons - and set about reading it on tour. But, as I hinted earlier, the text bristles with obscure and difficult words. As PB evidently didn't have access to a dictionary on tour, he underlined in pencil all the words he intended to look up when he got back home. As I was reading his own copy, I looked up all the words he underlined. One of them was "belantered". I chased it in vain through all the dictionaries I had to hand. When I consulted the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the mighty OED compressed into two breeze-block sized volumes with magnifying glass supplied) I couldn't find it there either. But where it should have been, my eye fell on –

"belamy : fair friend, good friend (esp. as form of address)."

Now how weird is that? And how perfectly, painfully apt? Moonwise is unnervingly full of strange, spectral coincidences like that. It's one of the reasons that makes it extraordinary.