Actor Oliver Ford Davies was today's guest. He spoke of the local Dorset dialect poet William Barnes and went on to speak a verse from Linden Lea in a very passable genuine Dorset accent despite his modest claim that it was a generalised Mummerset. Listeners to the programme may have shuddered at the version of VW's setting which followed. But shudder not. Tim Laycock, who sang and played, was using a concertina which does not possess all the required chromatic notes. Tim is also a great expert on not just the accent but the dialect too. In fact the recording used was from an LP, no longer available, called Lydninch Bells. Snap up one if you find it at a charity shop! It is mainly a disc of the spoken word, i.e. Barnes' poetry spoken by GENUINE Dorset voices, now thin on the ground. I must here pay tribute to an old friend of mine, David Strawbridge, who died a few years ago. He was a 'local grammar school boy made good' (if you'll pardon the un-PC expression) and went on to read Chemistry at University College Oxford. He made a point of never losing the Dorset manner of speech which would have been known by Barnes and Hardy. He is a major contributor to that LP where speech becomes close to music.