For such a brilliant man, Noel Coward had a pretty dim view of humanity, calling it ‘cruel, idiotic, sentimental, predatory, ungrateful, ugly, conceited and egocentric’. But he had a rare feel for its most distinctive and defining talent: language.

This was brought to mind recently by an old compilation tape. (Yes, tape!  I really am that ancient.)  I suddenly found myself listening to a track I hadn’t heard in probably thirty years, recalling every word, perfectly. Thanks, without a doubt, to Coward’s incomparable feel for the feel of language; the sound, the music, the rhythm of language, quite apart from any meaning.

Since the day that we were wed up to the present
Our lives we must confess have been progressively more unpleasant

With our deep subconscious minds we seldom dabble
But something must impel the words we spell when we’re playing Scrabble

History has adopted a somewhat ambivalent take on the man memorably described by Virginia Woolf as ‘clever as a bag of ferrets and trivial as a perch of canaries’, but only a cloth-eared dunderhead could miss his sublime instinct for euphony.

If you’d like to enjoy the whole thing, I put it up on YouTube, here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-NzyugjbNY&feature=youtu.be