venta | Everybody's dancing and feeling fine

It's Friday! It's about three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap some Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

This link will expire at some point in the future.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

Flanders and Swann - A Transport of Delight[*]

Now, bear with me. The better-educated among you won't have to wait for that download to finish to know that this isn't your average BAYD track. It's fairly jaunty, but it's hardly the stuff of feverish dancing. It sits a little oddly, to say the least, between the Violent Femmes and... well, and next week's track.

However, if you'll extend me a little tolerance, I've chosen to post this to mark a day which is, in my own personal calendar, a rather sad day. I'm a hopeless Luddite, and I like things with character. As such, I'm disappointed to hear of the demise of the Proper Red London Bus. Today is their last day in regular service; henceforth PRLBs, and their associated conductors, will be the stuff of heritage trails.

I'm sure that those newfangled buses with hinges are lovely in their own way, and they do have some advantages like being accessible to those in wheelchairs (something of which I'm sure Michael Flanders would have approved). But let's just spare three minutes to celebrate the wonderful iconic status of Proper Red London Buses - and how better than with a bit of Flanders and Swann.

Anyone who was brought up with insufficient exposure to Flanders and Swann ought to remedy it as swiftly as possible with the purchase of, for example, At The Drop of a Hat, or one of the reasonably priced best-ofs or collected-workses.

I've heard people sneer at Flanders and Swann as "dated". Of course they're sodding dated, some of these songs were written fifty years ago. They're funny in a gentler way than today's humour, they're terribly English, and the lyrics were penned in an age when you couldn't say "bugger" on the radio. I'd say they're of their time - and to me, their time is childhood Sunday tea-time, eating crumpets to the melodies of Madeira, M'dear and refusing to believe that "gnu" wasn't really pronounced like that[**].

If you're in London tonight, catch a Routemaster (as PRLBs are properly called) for me ?

[*] Thanks to

wimble for donating the mp3, as I only have a knackered tape copy made from the vinyl version at home. And yes, to anyone else who grew up with the vinyl recordings instead of this CD nonsense, they are singing the wrong words. I don't know where the Lagonda and the MG went, either.
Further thanks to

broadmeadow for remedying the hatchet-job I did on the file to cut the commentary, and for sorting my format problems out.

[**] For the record, I still refuse to believe you don't pronounce "gnu" like that.