I was in Gloucester the other day and I couldn't help noticing there was a shower of rain. But I didn't step in a puddle up to my middle and I do hope I will go there again.
The next day, a comment in the Guardian took me by surprise: nursery rhymes – like Dr Foster Went to Gloucester – are apparently in decline. Fewer parents are teaching their children the Mother Goose doggerel that has been part of English literacy since at least the 18th century. Some families are Mother Goose-free zones.
This was depressing. But what really upset me was the view of commentator John Harris that, well, nursery rhymes are kind of Tory, aren't they? Us lefties like rock'n'roll.
Maybe I missed a joke, or a level of irony. But unfortunately this disdain for the poor old Grand Old Duke of York and Mary and Her Little Lamb seems typical of a cultural shift among British liberals, as we now uncomfortably call ourselves when we'd rather be saying socialists. It's a shift that passed me by – and one that I think could be fatal if we don't snap out of it.
In the years of New Labour, it has become axiomatic, as it never was before, that to be on the left is to side with modern popular culture. Forget the long tradition (oh, but we're supposed to hate all traditions) of socialist thought that criticised the effects of the mass media, from Richard Hoggart to Raymond Williams; forget the folk singers of the 50s and early 60s who wanted to revive old ballads as a counterblast to Armageddon.
This isn't about a crass culture war. There is no culture war, only a cultural democracy. Yet somehow a myth has arisen that if you like Giotto di Bondone, you probably vote Tory, and if you like Frieze art fair and Michael Jackson, you're a diehard liberal-socialist. Now, I reckon Giotto's more leftwing than either of those modern options. And if there is ever to be a renewal of radicalism, it may as well start by understanding why.
