peggy seeger (in colour)

‘Darling’ I said, turning to my husband. ‘yes dear?’ he whispered. ‘You promised there wouldn’t be anyone playing the banjo in the North.' ‘Shush!’ came a voice from the row behind. ‘And what’s this woman doing playing in the village if she’s so famous anyway?’ My husband looked annoyed. ‘She and Ewan Mcoll used to come here and walk the fells in the sixties’, he explained. ‘She was just saying how little the village has changed’. Except that everything was in black and white back then of course, I thought. He went back to chewing his cuban cigar, sadly frustrated from completely authentically emulating Che Guevara by the smoking ban . It was a relief to hear the village was mostly full of southern downshifters even back then, but then I thought perhaps it was simply that she hadn’t been in town long enough this time around to listen to the village, only enough to see it.

It had been a difficult time lately and I suppose I should have just been grateful for some time with my husband. The Labour party had been having some terrible election results. I don’t know why people are so upset at raising taxes on the low paid. Don’t they know that if poor people are allowed to keep their own money they’ll only waste it on lager and satellite dishes. They should give more of it to people like me who’ll appreciate it and spend it on nice things instead. It's called redistribution of income. I wish people would pay attention, sigh. Then there was the Telegraph. Can you imagine? me? in the Torygraph? I couldn’t wear my Tony Blair for Pope t-shirt for a whole week out of shame.

I only found out about the suggestion that I was actually two men when the chap in the paper shop gave me a funny look when I went in for my Guardian. I think he fully believed I dropped my bag full of lady’s personal items just to prove some sort of point. It wasn't my fault, these feminine requisites are hard to come by up North and you have to buy up all you can when they're in the shops. The carrier bag broke under the strain, that's all. On reflection of course I can quite understand that rumour because if I really was a man than my recent output of three blog posts in two months meant there would have had to be two of me at the very least to maintain that kind of productivity.

The concert neared its end. At least Peggy Seeger had got through a whole gig without being deported, which was something I suppose. I wondered if I would still be writing Strife in the North when I was 73, and whether I would be so left wing as to make Joan Baez look like Margaret Thatcher. I sighed. As I gazed sadly at my George Bush count down keyring that I bought by way of blending in I thought about the singer's hope that Dubya would go soon and peace would come, but then unless he was going to be taking my children with him when he retired there’d be no peace for me this November, that was sure. sigh. 'Maybe we should bring some free love into the world ourselves later', I said to my husband, romantic and dangerous with his beret and cigar, but he reminded me we had a meeting with our interior designer about the colour scheme for the conservatory first thing so we should get an early night and put being spontaneous in our diaries for next weekend.