Tall, stooped, a quintessentially English presence. I listen to how those flat Fenland vowels swirl into melodies melded with the staccato RP of Cambridge.

So many minor key explorations of sadness; pull at the scabs of loneliness and regret. Your songs made plangent by the melancholic timbre of your voice. Your abiding mood irresolution, your secret regret. A troubadour of old.

You don't have to understand life is not a festival. You just let it happen to you,  every day, like a child you can be given many kisses and flowers. Saving time does not occur to a child. She softly loosens her hair, and keeps her innocence for a while, yet.

May you never lose that fragility of heart that hurt you so, when young. Your emptiness of soul was filled, at least passingly, by gentle, observational lyrics that lifted your songs into poems. Poems that very soon broke my heart.

And that’s my mea culpa. I cannot listen to.your achingly beautiful music without admittng to myself, again, your poems’ terrifying, and abiding, truth. All is lost, lost,  in time.