Do ye ken John Peel?

An elegy for the late, great English DJ, penned by David Stoner, our senior correspondent in Barcelona.

A few days ago, while ambling up the Rambla, I was whisked away back in time to a moment in the late seventies - I presume it was then. I was boarding-school schoolboy as we all were in those days. On one particular cold evening in November - rather like today, I suppose - I was sitting at a large solid wooden table in a Tudor-style house in a quintessential village a stone's throw from the town of Cambridge. It was half-term, you see, and this Laurie Lee-like world is where I would go on leave. It seemed to be colder in those days. That was probably because this was East Anglia and the North Sea freezing fog would wash in over the estuaries and endlessly flat sugerbeet-smelling farmland chilling you to the bones. Neither the cold nor the smell would ever leave you in peace. Unless, however, you were in that cottage home which did indeed provide a cosy retreat form the autumnal elements and boarding school.

More often than not, especially between the hours of ten and twelve, evenings were spent around that wooden table reading and listening to a large radio; the type made of metal and wood displaying an exotic array of large cities among the numbers on the dial: London, Bombay, Moscow, Buenos Aires, New York ... One particular evening while dreaming about such cosmopolitan destinations, a voice came over the airwaves interrupting my train of thought. To this day I have never forgotten what it said and have always had difficulty communicating how much it meant to me, and probably to countless others of my generation. It said ten magical words, and I am sure that when you read them you will know what I am talking about. It went like this: "And for no particular reason, 'Tommy Gun' by The Clash ..."