Well Nick - here's the rub: If you were to come to a local singaround and sing of your life with the travellers, you would have nothing but my respect - whatever picture you painted - because you've lived the life of which you sing.

What gets my goat are the dewey-eyed reflections about mill and factory life, as sung by schoolteachers, accountants and computer programmers (etc.). They see a faux romanticism in the songs - and you can tell that they've never experienced the realities of factory life in a mill town.

I worked on a farm as a kid, and in a factory in later life - and worked on motorway road construction as a student. It was interesting, to be sure, but there was a huge amount of drudgery and back-breaking work - with overtime necessary to earn some decent money. I wouldn't go back to that for a million years - nor to the system where a farm labourer who lost his job also lost his tied cottage. This happened to an earlier ancestor of mine.

It's not so much the times I'm knocking as the earnestness of those who sing about it with no idea of what it was really all about, and therefore invest it with a kind of unworthy nostalgia. Just call me a mouldy fig!