When folk rock’s demon fiddler Dave Swarbrick died at 75 on 3 June, it was barely noticed that Real Gone Music released Fairport Convention’s Live in Finland 1971 the same day. Featuring the lineup of Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks (drums), Simon Nicol (guitar), and Dave Pegg (bass), which performed at the annual Ruisrock festival that 22 August, the disc features seven songs played with such force and briskness you’d think they wanted to get the hell away from the Archipelago Sea.

Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland.

Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a teenager had been introduced to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew about the vast numbers of war dead, of how they exceeded the populations of famous cities.

Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.

Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His grounds were that I had failed to acknowledge the mortal danger facing those errant elopers, Hermia and Lysander. He had, he said, expected better of me.

On the itinerary of musical tourists around Europe, the opening of the Prague Spring Festival comes a close third to the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year's Day Concert and the Bayreuth experience. That said, Smetana's Má vlast (My Homeland) – the immoveable opener – is more of an acquired taste than Johann Strauss or Wagner.

Carla Lane, who has died at the age of 87, was the first from Liverpool. Before Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, long before Jimmy McGovern, hers was the loudest Liverpudlian voice on television portraying ordinary working people's lives. From The Liver Birds to Bread, from Butterflies to Solo, her comedies covered the waterfront of womanhood: husband-hunters, divorcees, matriarchal grandmothers, unhappy wives, mistresses.

Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are still here, for the male voice choir is one of the distinctive emblems of Welsh identity.

We don’t hear much about composer Stanisław Moniuszko in the West, but in Poland he’s considered a key figure in the history of opera. Moniuszko’s statue stands at the entrance of the National Opera House in Warsaw, and inside he’s depicted by several busts and portraits. In the second week of May, the venue hosted not only the Ninth International Stanisław Moniuszko Vocal Competition but also – in its Moniuszko Auditorium – Straszny dwór (The Haunted Manor), one of his most famous works.

It’s either serious or it’s funny. That’s a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing television comedy from my biography in the theatre programme.

“Why?” I asked.

“People will think you’re not a serious playwright.”

“A serious playwright can’t write comedy?”

“It’s a bit worse than that.”

“How, exactly?”

“Well, it’s not just that you’re writing comedy, it’s that you’re writing comedy for television.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s not good.”