If you smelt the scent of my last post correctly, you'll know I'm quite in love with music again. So it is good timing to revisit some of my favourite tracks, especially those that I've not listened to in some time.

Neil Hannon is an unmistakably fine songwriter. He is what Cole Porter may well have been if he had grown up with a ZX Spectrum. His latest offering, an album devoted to cricket as part of The Duckworth-Lewis Method, is glorious fun and British to its very coccyx. The track on my mind though is an earlier - heavier - work.

'If...' was a regular listen on my regular SE London bus journey home, which usually juddered slowly to my borough late at night over wet, hopeless, roads. While this song is in some ways a standard love song, for me it captures the essence of something often missed - the strange comfort of unrequited love. Listening to it takes me briefly back into that bubble you dare not burst, but instead you climb inside until something drags you out.