It goes: `The way you's actin' lately makes me doubt

It goes: `The way you's actin' lately makes me doubt.' Now surely that should read: `the way you is is actin' lately makes me doubt', or possibly, `is makes me doubt', at the end."We were frankly bewildered, yet the third line threw up an alternative theory: `Honey, won't you be my baby, baby?' Perhaps the repetition of `is' in the verb form `you is is' is no more than a simple echolalia, grammatically cognate with the repetition of `baby' in `baby, baby'."Yet the question remained why the "is" was repeated in "is you is my baby", while it was the "baby" in "Honey, won't you be my baby, baby?" The professor moved to the final line of the manuscript, which read: "Guess my flame in your heart done gone out."His earlier research had indicated that a primary echolalic repetition of the auxiliary verb "to be" appeared to take precedence over the dittographic "baby, baby", yet there was no repetition at all in the conjectural last line. "It runs: `Is you is or is you ain't my baby?' and I think you can already see what we are up against." The professor went on to explain that since the line is couched in the interrogative, he deduced that the indicative forms of the first verb must be "you is is" which raises the question of which "is" is the primary and which the auxiliary verb. The manuscript, which is thought to date from the early middle or late beginning of the 20th century, includes verb formations that have mystified grammarians. Theories about the early formation of the rules of English grammar have been thrown into confusion by the discovery in an attic in Soho of an old manuscript bearing what are believed to be primitive song lyrics. In England, also in February, C&A were forced to withdraw 6,000 pairs of Y-fronts from their stores because a manufacturing error had placed the hole in the wrong place. In Russia, one clothing factory is paying its workers in brassieres because of a cash crisis. Tests have shown the efficiency of a new design in underwear which responds to temperature controls in the classroom, set at levels designed to ensure that pupils are at their most comfortable and therefore more able to learn. I can't find a way of dealing with itnDavid Baddiel takes his first solo stand-up show on a two-month national tour, starting in Southend on 10 April.

It's made me feel all the banal things - I should keep in contact more with people.Stories for this column tend to be: "this happened to me, and I've learnt from it and moved on." What I'm saying is, this can't be put into that box: it's just damaging. The whole of culture, in a way, to sound pretentious, is about making sense of death, to say there is a reason to it and we can transcend it.This I would say is my first hard experience of death, and I don't feel that I can only feel negative things. I think I have a problem with that, I'm not someone who changes as a result of experience I'm very ingrained It's jolted me a lot I feel it as more of a naked thing, a hurting thing. All I've learnt from it is facts: like, death is random; like, when a friend dies it's really different from when an old relative dies.It hasn't made me think I should live my life in a different way - which perhaps would be useful. So all that declines is the amount of time you spend thinking about it.If I had found a way of dealing with it, subsumed it into another part of my personality, perhaps I would have learnt from it and gone on to change my ways But I haven't. Every time I think about it I feel exactly the way I did when I first found out that she'd died, this frustration at having misplaced something.And you think that should decline with time, and it declines in so far as you're not thinking about it all the time - when she died it was all I could think about - but every time her name comes up.

Sometimes people strive to describe someone dying and they do so in very intelligent ways, evocative ways. But not trying to do that, just saying something which isn't trying to sum up the experience, to render it in an original way - something about that really moved, because it is un-encapsulable You can't do it.I will never get over it properly. I just started weeping buckets.I don't know why that phrase should have done it; there's something about the quaintness of it in the face of something so terrible and wasteful; something sweet. She was the only one who bound this whole crowd of people together.I was late for the memorial service It's weird what makes you cry.

There was an incredibly moving speech by a guy called Neil, but what made me cry was something much more banal - a friend of hers called her "a grande dame" and translated it as "great lady" And for some reason that really destroyed me. You accept that with a sort of peace, but when a friend dies you can't help feeling this sense of rage, of having lost something in a mundane way. You just think, oh where is it, where are they? Because they're just a fixture. You know your grandparents aren't a fixture, that they're going to go.I went to her memorial service, and she was a very sociable character, she had loads of friends from different walks of life and at the service and at the party afterwards there were all these people I knew I'd probably never see again, because I only ever saw them in the context of Susie. And he was really distraught; it was not his fault at all, just a misunderstanding But it was a very peculiar way to find out. And then the next night, this guy rang up, who I had never heard of, and said, have you heard the news about Susie? And I thought he meant that she was in intensive care, so I said yes And he said, oh well, we'd like you to write an obituary.

An incredibly lovely and energetic woman.Anyway, I spoke to her husband, who was obviously in a terrible state. And he said, at the moment her kidneys have started working again, so we're hoping if they keep working, we can find a heart. Someone else I knew hanged themselves, and they had always had the shadow of death around them.But Susie was absolutely the epitome of life; she would not have been anywhere near my bleak Venn diagram of people who might die before their time. One was a guy who took a vast amount of drugs, an incredibly dangerous character, an epileptic.