Some compliments turn out to be anything but. A senior BBC colleague – historian, television Head of Department, radio Network Controller and great human being – was in the habit of introducing me to people as ‘a distinguished musicologist’. It wasn't worth saying so, but I always thought, ‘Excuse me, that door closed fifteen years ago’ (after a few unsuccessful university job applications and interviews). Co-opted into broadcasting, the most I hoped my radio programmes would do was infect others with my own love of music – and that, of course, was what made Controller-Man commend me in the first place. Musicology meant learning and analysis for their own sakes; those are very worthy things, but had little to do my imagined listeners. (Was not BBC Audience Research's typical Third Programme panellist ‘a chemist's assistant in Watford’?)

So when after half a lifetime I felt a surge of interest in the music of one of my former Oxford tutors, it was frustrating to find the one sizeable book about Edmund Rubbra concentrating on technical analysis at a level that must make much of it unusable for an ordinary music-lover. While offering useful information about his life and the reception of his works when first performed, it dealt with the actual music through very specific listing of just what happens to what basic intervals at what points in Rubbra's major pieces. That followed the intricate workings of the composer's mind but was not what one would recommend to engage the curiosity of Watford Chemist's Assistant's successor.