You know that experience when a piece of music gets embedded in your consciousness so it keeps cropping up every moment your attention isn’t fully fixed on a task or a conversation? It can be any kind of music according to your tastes.

Some years ago a classical orchestral tune got into my mind while I was on a long-distance trail (the English Coast to Coast). It was quite repetitive and went well with the steady walking. I tried analysing it, working out what kind of music it was, what period and who might have written it. I though possibly Sibelius. Then suddenly after days it came to me – not Sibelius but Beethoven, the March Funebre from the “Eroica”. In that instant the music vanished and I could not recall it. When I got home I played the CD and there it was. It was replaced at the time by an Irish folk song (The Two Sisters) from a Clannad collection with the very appropriate line “so then she sank in the rushy swamp”.

In the last few days I found myself trapped with Joan Baez singing “Silver Dagger”. I hadn’t listened to a Joan Baez recording for ages. I found the CD and played it. That took “Silver Dagger” out of my mind and replaced it with “Fare thee Well” (“Ten Thousand Miles”). After a couple of days of that in the background came a change. “Silver Dagger” came back.