Hi Iain … well spotted😀. John Mannel at the CornerHOUSE was good enough to draw my attention to your comment above. Here, if of any passing interest, is some brief explanation and background. I kinda like to bookend songs with a bit of a guitar intro and outro. As in my spoken intro, Broken Glass is a song composed by David Francey, a friend - who originally, like me, hails from Ayrshire but who, unlike me, lives in Canada. David’s own intro to the song explains that one trigger for writing it came at a time when his then teenaged and pure Canadian daughter was starting to date boys. I’ve always been a great admirer of the equally quintessential Canadian, Bruce Cockburn - with that half-baked thought sparking the idea of using the Pacing the Cage as my bookends to Broken Glass. When David was last on tour in the UK - and before I’d played Broken Glass anywhere in public - he happened to be staying over with us for a couple of nights. Having already recorded another of his songs in the past, I mentioned that, provided he’d no objections, I was minded to add Broken Glass to my repertoire, including my tenuous reason for employing the Pacing the Cage motif. Turned out David was no less of a fan of the estimable Mr Cockburn. He asked me play it and then to play it again, taking a video on the second time around, before graciously agreeing. You prob'ly didn’t need to know any of that .. but you might agree that background doesn’t offer an audience the greatest of song intros🤡. Many thanks for giving it a listen🤙. Bob

The Minches are a couple of straits between the Hebrides and Scotland! There's a big one and a small one

uilleann pipes

Glad you liked it, Pete. Shanties always get the audience singing along and this is one we love to perform.

Yes, it's a cover, but Tom was on the original recording along with Richard Thompson.

So, as things stand it’s almost a hundred years ago and being sung in sing-arounds and folk clubs by people - the very definition of folk music In addition i’ve been singing this myself for over fifty years and I learned it from someone two generations older than me and have taught it to my grand-son - so thats 5 generations right there As for your ridiculous assertion of proper folk songs being sung for ‘thousands of years’ what a load of old tosh - ‘sumer is a cumin in’ pretty much the oldest extant folk song from this country that we have concrete evidence for is only mid 13th century -ie not yet a thousand years. If you disregard anything later than that then there simply is not British folk scene at all.