And how many teenaged girls spend an hour each morning chanting Sanskrit or writing the characters with a bamboo pen?

We had a professor at uni, obsessed with AC/DC and The Bill. I couldn’t stand most of her shallow self-important nonsense, but she taught Popular Culture in the Twentieth Century — with a special emphasis on the bits she’d been around for, of course — and I found Sarstedt and Donovan far more interesting than many of the more famous groups.

Carnaby Street and Swinging London sounded fabbo, but when I finally poked my nose in forty years later, it was nothing special. I once had a Facebook friend who had been part of that world with a minor title and a string of famous lovers, but now she ranted about fox-hunting and global warming hoaxes and the indignities of growing old and I unfriended her after the umpteenth passion over Brexit. But I wish now that I had made better notes of her drunken reminiscences.

The connection is Yeats, of course. He knew his Sanskrit.

Britni