Way back, long before I first had a book published, I wrote quite a lot of songs. Initially I wrote the lyrics for someone else to put melodies to, but later on I found that I could write tunes myself. And what a joy to produce a complete song! I gave up songwriting in the mid-1980s, mainly because I’d run out of musician-friends to accompany me while I sang into an old reel-to-reel tape deck. But we’ve moved on since then. With today’s technology I can pull together and arrange all the instruments myself and record onto a hard drive. This is what I’ve been doing of late: recording some of my old songs and writing new ones. The joy of songwriting is back!

Isadora Humble is not one of my new songs. It was written in the late 1970s with Hampshire musician/performer Des George. The night I recorded it, a couple of months ago, I was in the mood for an old-style rocker and Isadora Humble (which I’d never recorded before) filled the bill perfectly. It might not be a very modern-sounding song, but I still love the rock ‘n’ roll of my youth, so it pleases me if no one else.