See...this is how this works...

It may not be sophisticated, but it works.

I get home from work, fire up the box and see who's doing what.

I check Robbie (who still hasn't caught on yet...) and notice a comment I'd missed before...

So I followed the link to their site...

and I find this from a few days earlier...

They talk about being here, and seeing this...

They give credit to this guy for posting a comment link to a story in the UK Guardian.

And just where, after clicking here and there, does all that work get you?

Nowhere especially special.

For most people maybe.

Except in the writers mind - and the special afternoon she will always remember.

And share.

Like this.

It sounds hokey - but it's not, not the way [he] sang it, and certainly not in its first incarnation - the song is based on an intensely touching scene from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

I mention this.

"You know that book?" he says, his face lighting up.

"I love that book," I say. "And you know that book!" Why am I surprised that Johnny Cash has read Steinbeck?

"Know that book?" he says. "I was that book." He smiles at me. It's kind of like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam. He pronounces it "Grapesawrath", like Rose of Sharon is pronounced Rosasharn.

"You like that song?" he says, and he pulls over his guitar.

What, really?

He tunes up. I can't quite believe my fortune here. He starts to play, and he sings that song. In his front room. That pure, deep, thundery, reverberating voice, just across from me on the other sofa.

"All that was part of my childhood," he says, when it's over. Then he tells me about the flood when he was a kid, that leads to Five Feet High and Rising. "You like that song?" Yes I do.

He sings it for me.

"What else, now," he says. "You like Man in Black, don't ya?"

Well yes, I do. And I Walk the Line, and the Tennessee Flat-top Box, and the Long Black Veil, and Ring of Fire, and the Ballad of Ira Hayes, and John Henry, and some I'd never heard before.

So, we were there all afternoon, in that shadowy room, and it was one of the finest afternoons I've ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I've ever done. We hardly talked. This is how he's choosing to communicate, I realised. By singing. Which from a singer is not unreasonable - in fact it's possibly more right, more true, than answering interview questions. Also - I turned the tape recorder off. Why? A one-on-one personal Johnny Cash concert on the sofa and you turned the tape off? Why? Answer: because I knew this was not something which could be repeated. Couldn't be, shouldn't be.

He did say one thing I remember: "You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it."

And I came out realising that I didn't want to be a journalist any more.

Yeah.

I think she made the right decision.