Songfacts®:

• Vashti Bunyan wrote this folk-pop tune about living in the woods with her boyfriend, Robert Lewis, in the summer of 1968. With her recording career behind her - or so she thought - she took a train out to the Ravensbourne College of Art at Bromley Common in southeast London, where Lewis was a penniless student struggling through his last semester. With nowhere to live, he set up a cozy living space beneath a rhododendron bush behind the college, and Bunyan moved in. She wrote the love song "Glow Worms" during this time.
  
  When they were eventually evicted from the property, the couple set out on a horse-and-cart journey to the Isle of Skye, where the Scottish singer Donovan was renting his property out to artists.
• The lyrics tell the story of Timothy and Emily Grub, who build a house in the woods and live there until two "blue men" kick them out. The blue men are the policemen that forced Bunyan and Lewis off the land because it was owned by the Bank of England. The rest of the cast of characters are Maurice Snail, Swanney, Blue, and Black Bess. Snail is Lewis' art-school friend John James, who often visited the couple and played the organ and dulcitone on Just Another Diamond Day. His Collie was really named Swanney, while Blue was also named after Bunyan's real-life dog. Bess was the name they gave the horse who took them on their travels from London to the Outer Hebrides.
• Bunyan told the Songfacts Podcast that she never planned to turn her travel songs into an album, but when she met producer Joe Boyd during a break in the journey, he convinced her to fashion them into her debut album, Just Another Diamond Day. It was released without fanfare in 1970, but quietly gained momentum in the ensuing decades, inspiring folk artists like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsome. When Bunyan first got on the internet in 1997 and learned that people were interested in her music, she decided to have the album remastered for a CD release. The 2000 reissue revived Bunyan's long-abandoned career. She recorded two more albums, Lookaftering and Heartleap.
• Robert Kirby did the strings and recorder arrangements for the album and also played the trumpet at the end of this tune. Prior to working on Just Another Diamond Day, Kirby arranged strings on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left album, which was also produced by Joe Boyd.