This extract from The Ballad Of Sid Kipper was extracted before its publication for reasons of space.  Or possible taste.

Sid was still busy touring clubs and theatres all over the country, but he discovered that during his absence the singing in the Old Goat Inn had suffered a disastrous decline.

"They reckoned my sort of singing was honestly all out of fashion, and they'd got one of those Carry Oakley machines instead.  I mean, it was a folk Carrry Oakley machine, so some of the time you were singing along to nothing, due to the song being an unaccompanied one, but a lot of it was things like On Top Of Old Smoky and Are You Going To Scarborough Fair, Canticle?  I mean, what have songs like that got to do with people in St Just?  There's no-one in our village called Canticle!  And it meant that highly skilled folk singers like me weren't needed, 'cos any fool could get up and do it.  Personally I reckon only a fool would get up and do it - which meant that in the Old Goat there was a lot of takers."

St Just-near-Trunch must have been one of the last places in the country where folk song became old fashioned!  Centuries of tradition were being threatened by the advance of technology.  But Sid proved himself a man of action, and did the one thing nobody expected - he joined forces with the only person who lamented the loss of the singing as much as he did, his arch enemy, Cyril Cockle.

"Well, I went in the Old Goat, and Cyril was the only person to talk to, due to all the others being busy at the Carry Oakley.  So we got to talking, and I realised he wasn't all bad.  I mean, don't get me wrong, he's mostly bad, but everyone have a good bit in them somewhere, and that even applies to Cyril.  We found out we both hated the machine, and we decided to have a truce on the feud which has gone on between our families for centuries and see if we couldn't do something about it.  We made up a plan where one of us would unplug the machine, and in the confusion the other would get up and sing.  But which should do which?  I pointed out that he was the only one who knew where the plug was, so he should do that bit.  He said he could easily tell me where it was, but I said no, the first rule of plotting was never to tell no-one nothing they didn't need to know.  He said he didn't know that, and I said that was alright, 'cos he didn't need to."

Astonishingly the plan worked.  The machine went off and Sid rose to sing The Innocent Dodo.  The effect was stunning.  They clapped and cheered, they carried him shoulder high through the streets, and they threw the machine out of the pub (although the fact that Ernie Spratt had just announced that he was going to charge for its use may have had a bit to do with it).

"Everything went back to how it always was, and Cyril and I resumed the family feud by having a fight about who's idea it had been."