@Ed the Folkie and LFF

1. No, no: I know "We'll Gather Lilacs" itself well (and my aunt sang it on All India Radio Calcutta in the 1970s). What I meant was: there is a LATER Novello song which parodies the first line of the earlier one (just as G&S referred tongue in cheek to "that infernal nonsense Pinafore!")   It is this LATER song I heard J Bronhill sing, the line in it is something like "We'll *even* gather lilacs in the spring again"...

I sing "Lilacs" myself all the time,though I cannot get "want to know" properly... _The Economist_ in the 1990s had an article in which it referred to its "almost folk-song" cadences...

2. I will go to Graves and see about the burning home fires.

3. The way P Routledge sings off key makes it crystal clear that she is doing so deliberately and with effort, and *can* or *could* sing if she wanted to. It would be interesting to know if she pulled these songs out of her own hat, or if the scriptwriters did it for her. She was also, I think, in an early Joe Orton play.

4. Thank you for the pointers to _Tom Jones_ and _Crest of the Wave_ music.

Sanjay Sircar