The past is another country, but we can still look over the border once in a blue moon... and it was a full blue moon on New Year's Eve so what better way to celebrate than dancing through midnight with Sgt. Peppers Only Dart Board Band and the songs that were the soundtrack of my college days. Fast-forward a few years, and I'm interviewing Linda McCartney in the Apple Studio for a photography magazine. While we're talking I can hear someone coming down the corridor, whistling (I swear this is true) The Long And Winding Road.
Linda introduces me to the whistler as he enters. 'This is my husband', she says, adding helpfully as he shakes my hand, 'Paul.'
I still have the tape. Paul McCartney is saying, 'Hello Crysse' and I'm saying 'hhh... ahhhh....'




So as we lift this new decade from its wrapping, still box-fresh, all together now:
All you need is love,
All you need is love,
All you need is love,
Love is all you need.

At last, a splash of commonsense in an article about author copyright. Nick Inman, writing in The Author - the journal of the Society of Authors - points out to ranters against 'piracy' that the word itself is simplistic, emotive, and inaccurate. "Real pirates steal stuff: if they've got it, you haven't. Copiers do not deprive anyone of anything - they increase rather than reduce supply of the goods in question... and we make a grave error if we cannot see the difference between a lost sale and a sale that never was." He challenges the ethos of "obsessive insistence that using or enjoying must equate with owning." Not Captain Hooks, in short, but Robin Hoods: "Is it any wonder that the 'pirates' get the idea that copyright is wielded by the powerful as a means of economic protectionism? More seriously, also cultural protectionism - a deliberate attempt to restrict words and ideas to those who can pay for them."
Let's make this the decade that positive anarchy finds its voice - or at least the decade when writers take more responsibility for making the world we'd like to inhabit. More here.
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