S is for Prince in Switzerland (A to Z on Tolkien and the Inklings)

was supposed to be for Robert Havard, family doctor to the Lewises and Tolkiens, and occasional Inkling.

But I find I have no specific anecdote about him and, instead, have yet another reason to wonder what is in the air in 2016.

I'm referring to the news about Prince -- it broke yesterday around dinner time our time.

Of course, with Prince, you can't go running to the Internet to listen to all the songs you remember and various albums one after another (as I did with Bowie. I wouldn't need to do this at all if all our CDs and tapes weren't in storage!). If you search for Prince at all on YouTube, you get, on the first page, some rather disturbing results and not a single one of his songs.

After some more searching through Google, I managed to find a Polish site that had a copy of the official video for Diamonds and Pearls (I was about 13 when this song came out), and another suspicious looking site had The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

One thing that was entirely new to me: Prince wrote a song about the vineyards in our canton! It's called Lavaux, and was featured on the album 20Ten, the one given away with various newspapers and Rolling Stone.

You can still listen to the song on the 20 Minutes website, but I've got no way to link to it here. But I can feature the lyrics:

One of the historians I follow on Twitter was suggesting we should make a roll of the dead (I never even mentioned Victoria Wood, among others, on the blog) in Old English, as the list keeps expanding and maybe this will help make it all seem more elegant and story-like.

What songs have been stuck in your head recently?