I have been much cheered in the last gasp of this year by a bit of music 3 min. 31 sec. long. It is called O Boi no telhado (“The Ox on the Roof”), as it’s from Brazil, the hit of the Rio Carnival of 1918.

I realise that, if you haven’t heard it, my enthusiasm might be as baffling as the vivid dreams with which other people bore us. Still, my own newspaper 150 years ago used to run long but popular art-criticism columns without reproducing the paintings discussed. Readers would either go to the exhibitions or buy engravings from print-shops. It was the same with music. With no records, you’d be lucky to hear a work performed, but could buy the sheet music, sometimes transcribed for piano.

In our easy online world, you can just type into your search engine “O Boi no telhado banda naval”, because what you want is the 1918 recording by the band of Brazil’s Marines. Indeed I think it’s the only recording made in 102 years.

The rendition has unkindly been called repetitious. It sounds wobbly, trumpety, tuberous, euphonious, to my happy ears, with decorative gaitas and flautins probably: fifes and piccolos. Such a performance might last all the drowsy autumn (in Brazil) afternoon during the carnival. The carnival wasn’t so flash and amplified in 1918, but shared some aspects, I imagine, of the great cattle show at Zafra I once enjoyed – a parched Michaelmas thrash for half a million from all over Extremadura and beyond, with cows thrown in. After a while the headache became part of the crowd.