Not a single, in the UK at least, so it doesn’t really conform to the artificial rules of this category; but hey! It’s perfection.

Sometimes when I hear this song it reminds me of lying in bed in a Nissen hut in Killin recovering from a cartilage operation. It came over the hospital radio one day.

Ah! The potency of music to unlock memories.

Most usually, though, I just think how good it is.

Unless it was played that week I was in hospital, this is unusual in that it reached the top ten without ever being featured on Top of the Pops.

The reason for that was probably its length. The Boxer is one of those long fade-out songs like Hey Jude. Except this doesn’t fade out. It ends.

Sublimely.

This morning it was pretty dark when I left the house. Well, it is only one week away from the shortest day and the overcast didn’t help. But it seemed much worse than last week and Friday was only three days ago. It was still more or less dark when I got to work and also when I left to drive home. So I’ve barely seen any daylight.

Dawn still gets progressively later over the next week and even though sunset has passed its earliest by now it gets later by a smaller margin so the days still shorten.

Had the clocks not changed in October I would already have had a month or so of travelling to work in the dark (with daylight only appearing around ten o’clock) and there would have been little or no lightness in the evening to compensate. Plus after the New Year another month of the same grind to get through.

(I’ve heard that people in Norway who only get one hour of daylight at this time of year don’t bother with it and just keep their curtains closed.)

As it is the mornings will be brightening from the beginning of January. And there’s a holiday season coming up. Reasons to be cheerful. Maybe.

I might give the game tomorrow night a miss, though.