But then the snow turned to rain

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’

My daughter when small came home from school one night singing these extraordinary lines: ‘Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me/ And will thy favours never lighter be?’ Five hundred years on, this Tudor ballad, said to have been played at hangings, provides the theme, and the structure, of Seasonal Suicide Notes. Only, this being the 21st century after all, it is bawled, not from a cart to Tyburn but from a converted convent in Bromyard, being Roger Lewis’s latest book.

Once Professor Lewis had it all, for he was a butcher’s boy from Bedwas, which meant that in Wales he was of the upper class, so his childhood was full of sausages, also cine cameras, puppet theatres and a donkey called Emily.