On Friday I had to go to Cardiff to speak at a conference arranged by the Welsh Music Foundation. This wouldn’t have presented any problems, had there not been a landslide somewhere between Swindon and Bristol Parkway which really screwed up the best laid plans of First Great Western to run trains between the English and Welsh capitals. Somehow I managed to get on a train which, even with delays, promised to get me into Cardiff in time for the event. The journey was long, as despite the landslide having been cleared, the train had to travel at a ridiculouly slow speed in the area affected by the landslide – presumably just in case there was another landslide. If I were the driver, my attitude would be: let’s get this bloody train through this whole landslide area as quickly as possible, rather than loitering around waiting for us to be buried under several tonnes of Wiltshire soil.

But I wasn’t the driver. I sat in coach E, seat 11, planning what I might have to say to a roomful of Welsh people about music and the internet, while an elderly lady behind me described in detail into her mobile phone a recent hospital procedure she’d had. “Yes, I know,” she said at one point. “If you think that sounds bad, wait until you hear about my colonoscopy.” I actually found myself with my fingers in my ears, singing “la-la-la-la-la-la-laaaaa”, which is a tune I made up especially for the occasion.

The event went quite well. I wasn’t stupidly incoherent, which was a bonus. The chat mainly centred around the Schema project; during the question and answer session one Welsh chap with long hair said “I’m not being funny or anything, right, but like, why don’t you, like, do it all again, but this time, like, get someone else to write the song, and get someone else to sing it?” He wasn’t being rude, he was genuinely trying to be helpful. I find honesty of that kind very disarming – and obviously very funny – although not so disarming and funny that I’d offer to buy him a pint in the bar afterwards.

Yesterday afternoon an experiment was conducted in Soho: that experiment was “booking a room at karaoke-funhouse Lucky Voice during the afternoon, and get ten people to go along and sing without having copious amounts of booze coursing through their veins”. Although I’m a fan of the karaoke experience, it’s the kind of thing you need to really give your all to, and for some reason it’s tricky when you know that people are shopping in daylight scant yards away. I delivered a lacklustre version of “Native New Yorker”. The version they have of Scritti Politti’s “The Word Girl”, by the way, is terrible – the chords are all wrong. I mean, the chords might have been all wrong in “Native New Yorker” as well, but I’m not in Odyssey (more’s the pity) so I didn’t pick up on that.

What worked far better, however, was Bernard Cribbins’ “Right Said Fred”, a magnificent tale of removal men confronted with a particularly cumbersome piano. The two Americans in our party seemed slightly nonplussed by the song, a fact which I recounted to Jenny on the phone earlier on. “Right,” she said. “So, what’s this song?” “You know,” I said, “Bernard Cribbins, Right Said Fred?” She’d not heard of it. This indicates to me that not as many people know this song as I originally thought, despite the fact that it got to number 10 in, er, 1962. Which also means that these people are generally unaware of the genesis of the name of bald homosexual pop group Right Said Fred, either, who got to number 1 in 1991, or something. Anyway, here’s Bernard’s magnum opus, although some believe that Hole In The Ground is better. They’re wrong.