This Sunday how could I not write a few – bound to be inadequate – words about Dave.
He did not think he was extraordinary. “This genius thing, Ian,” he once said to me, “what you think it is? I ain’t no genius. Plenty people I know well, know more music than me. I do what I do and I love it!”
Well, Dave, that’s how it begins for sure. But what he then did in his lifetime became a master’s work that will never be forgotten in the nation and the region.
We used to exchange short notes and sometimes have longer conversations on this, that and the other things we had written about in our respective columns. Once, talking about poetry, I told him how sometimes a poem comes full blown in an instant but sometimes it needs hard work to get it right. I remember he then told me about ‘Not a Blade of Grass’ – he had done it very quickly but he knew at once that it had turned out well. Yes, it certainly had. It became unforgettable in the nation as a second anthem of resolve and defiance.