A Question of Sport

On the morning of his first match for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park, Cliff Morgan caught a double-decker bus outside his terrace home in the Rhondda Valley.

‘It was packed,’ he said, chuckling at the notion of any latter-day international footballer enduring such a prosaic mode of public transport. ‘So packed that I stood all the way to Cardiff.’

Des O’Brien, one of the Irish back row planning to ambush his 20-year-old Cardiff team-mate, had sent him a telegram the day before: ‘Congratulations Cliff, bach. Is your life insured?’

Cliff Morgan (7 April 1930 – 29 August 2013); a Welsh Born Icon.

How we live now

As I learned last year, if you put down your smart phone you can actually get a three dimensional panoramic view of the heavens and the earth with your eyes and store it in your mind for future reminiscence; better than a photograph.

The Sultan

Relaxing over an Empire Stout at the Sultan last night, I noted that its Annual September Fest is on between 21 and 22 September.

22 guest ales from around the country, 2 or 3 traditional ciders plus a full range of Hop Back beers available.
Barbecue both days plus a beer garden.
Cases of Entire Stout and Summer Lightning only £26.
36 pint polypins from £57 and 18 pint minipins from £30
Special Hop Back seasonal brews each week,

I'm not sure if I will be around but I should try and make it.

Whatever happened?

Paul Roberts:  Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?
Myself:  He got an ice pick that made his ears burn

Paul Roberts: Whatever happened to dear old Lenny, the great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?
Myself  Pass*

Paul Roberts: Whatever happened to all the heroes?
Myself: All the Shakespearoes? They watched their Rome burn

Paul Roberts, who was the lead singer of The Stranglers between 1990 and 2006, is your host for the Tuesday night pub quiz in the 'Nonce. This fact cheers me so mightily that I am hugging myself in my mind.

---

* Lenny Bruce, Elmyr de Hory, and, for it is he, Sancho Panza. You are Lobby Lud and I claim my five pounds

Hi, I'm Dr Strabismus and I'm a bucolic

It’s nearly 11am, the cricket is about to start, the radio is on and the milkman has just arrived with milk for the weekend.

In the distance the sun is warming up the Sussex Downs; this is the countryside, this is England. If Andrew Murray and Cliff Richard rode past my window on a tandem and waving it wouldn’t be a surprise.

But back to milk and how wearable technology is producing better milk on our doorsteps. Eight million people in the UK now sport wearable technology, but animals wear it as well.

One such technology is something called MooMonitor, a necklace worn by cows that monitors cows’ health and fertility. Its owners describe it as ‘dairy SatNav’ and say that the MooMonitor’s technology is replicated in rockets and torpedoes.

There's a farm called Misery, but of that we'll have none
Because we know of one
That's always lots of fun (Ha ha!)
And this one's name is Jollity; believe me, folks, it's great
For everything sings out to us as we go through the gate

My Cup Runneth Over

Yesterday Cardiff City beat Manchester "The Richest Club in the World" City 3-2 in the Premiership taking them from bottom to a very handy eleventh place.

The day before at the Herne Hill Harriers Open, the Bomber won the U13 boys javelin (in a week in which he hadn't trained for the event at all) by throwing six and a half metres further than he managed last time out.

I got an email from his coach later saying that would put him well within the top fifty in the UK for this season.

I wonder what he could do with a bit of application? Still it is best to let him find his own way. The last thing I want to do is nag any of the joy out of it for him.

99 problems but the rich ain't one

Top 50 First World Problems

•It's boiling hot outside but freezing in the air-conditioned office
•My personal trainer took the week off so I have to workout alone
•My wallet won't close because there's too much money in it
•I bought a dishwasher and now spend longer packing and unpacking it than I did washing up
•My Brie is too hard
•No semi-skimmed milk in the supermarket, just full fat
•Earphones getting tangled up in your bag
•Chipped nail varnish
•Warm Pimms
•The cleaner taking a day off
•Trying to keep electricals out of the sun while sunbathing
•Watch / jewellery causing unsightly tan lines
•Spotting someone wearing the same outfit as you
•Squeaky new shoes which hurt while breaking them in
•Snagging designer clothing
•Over / under brewed tea
•Remote control batteries running out
•A disappointing air freshener
•The wind blowing your summer dress or skirt up
•Stepping on something wet while wearing socks
•Hair sticking to lipstick or lip balm in the slightest breeze
•Updating your mobile phone and losing all your contacts
•Sitting on your designer sunglasses
•Getting a fishbone stuck in your throat
•Two Weetabix not fitting in a round bowl properly, resulting in one becoming soggy and the other dry
•Having to watch movies on a phone because the tablet battery died
•Wanting another car, but not having room on the driveway
•Wanting to take your laptop outside but the wire doesn't reach far enough
•The living room isn't big enough for a coffee table and recliner sofas
•Getting suntan lotion in your eyes while reading outdoors in the sunshine
•Getting popcorn in your teeth
•Forgetting your phone charger
•Cold leather car seats in the winter
•Car won't play MP3s
•The football match being on Sky and not terrestrial TV
•The hairdresser moving house
•Having to go to the Post Office to collect a parcel
•Being out when a parcel gets delivered
•Supermarket checkout staff scanning faster than you can pack
•Sky+ recordings clashing
•Having a restaurant table indoors on a sunny day
•Nail polish clashing with lipstick
•Batteries going in the Sky remote
•The cash machine giving you a £50 note
•The shop not stocking a coke bottle with your name on
•Heel getting stuck in the decking of a boat/yacht
•Living somewhere too posh for a cheap corner shop
•Having the last edition of the iPhone
•The sun glare on your iPad / phone tablet
•A neighbour using the same Laura Ashley wallpaper

Oh, my Friends, be warned by me

Strange to remark I didn't manage to leap from my bed at the break of dawn and make it to yoga.

Rum punch and the blues are to blame. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Oh, and by the way:

A footballer in an FA Cup preliminary round match was shown the red card for pulling down his shorts in front of the referee.

AFC Croydon Athletic midfielder Louis Blake was brought on for his club debut in the second half of his club's game against Colliers Wood and was called up by the referee for wearing underwear that clashed with his kit.

The ref then demanded that the player be sent off the field to find a replacement pair.

Blake, 21, returned to the pitch without any underwear on.

On the referee's request that he "prove" he had changed his shorts, the young player complied and pulled on his shorts "to show him there was nothing there", only to be sent off for flashing the ref.

"I was gobsmacked, I was shocked and I was angry. I just pulled my shorts forward a bit to show him there was nothing there and he gave me a red," said Blake.

"How else am I meant to prove I’ve got nothing on down there?

"All I wanted to do was make a good impression on my debut and now I’m probably going to have to miss three games."

When the going gets weird the weird turn pro.

Our bodies are our gardens to which our wills are gardeners.

What with the crash and roar of Nathan Cleverly losing his world title last weekend, I initially missed the fact that Londoner Darren Baker had climbed back up from the canvas to win the IBF Middleweight world title.in Atlantic City on Saturday.

I'd read about him before in the build up to the fight astounded to find that, due to a hip problem he was training with yoga and swimming and did no road work at all.

I was too hung over to go to Bikram at 8am last Saturday, though I did swim later in the day and caught up with my yoga practice on Sunday. I mustn't let that happen again tomorrow after tonight's blues at the Mills.

As to the meditation side of things, Scott Raab could have been channeling me when he wrote:

I've been aware for a long time that my default version of mindfulness — relentless hypervigilance spiked liberally with dread — isn't the optimal recipe for living a balanced life. A dash of OCD, a touch of bipolar disorder, a sprinkling of sociopathy, a heavy dusting of addiction: Mix constantly and serve piping hot. Feeds exactly one raging asshole.

Pimientos de Padrón

I got some Padrón peppers in my vegetable box this week and remembered John telling me about eating them when he went to Spain with Juan years ago.

The intriguing peculiarity of Padrón peppers is the Russian Roulette effect. Most of them are mild, but about one in ten is super hot. Because it is impossible to distinguish the hot pepper from the milder pods, eating a portion of Padrón peppers is like taking your life in your hands. There's a Spanish saying: "Pimiento de Padrón, pequeño pero matón", which translates roughly as "Padrón Pepper, a teeny-weeny thug".

I'm hoping for something similar if 24 Pesos serve up old-school meat and potatoes blues on the Abbeyfest bandstand tomorrow might, some of the jazz has been a touch bland over the last six weeks or so if  may venture to opine.

Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

The great Elmore Leonard has died aged 87. In the bizarre way of the world I first learned of this masterly American crime and Western writer from Dennis Healey's autobiography (also a good book as it happens).

I pass on Leonard's 10 rules of writing below as a public service.

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said'' . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''

This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

It's Dr Strabismus's world, we just live in it

Exhibit A

When Dmitry Argarkov was sent a letter offering him a credit card, he found the rates not to his liking.

But he didn't throw the contract away or shred it. Instead, the 42-year-old from Voronezh, Russia, scanned it into his computer, altered the terms and sent it back to Tinkoff Credit Systems.

Mr Argarkov's version of the contract contained a 0pc interest rate, no fees and no credit limit. Every time the bank failed to comply with the rules, he would fine them 3m rubles (£58,716). If Tinkoff tried to cancel the contract, it would have to pay him 6m rubles.

Tinkoff apparently failed to read the amendments, signed the contract and sent Mr Argakov a credit card.

"The Bank confirmed its agreement to the client's terms and sent him a credit card and a copy of the approved application form," his lawyer Dmitry Mikhalevich told Kommersant. "The opened credit line was unlimited. He could afford to buy an island somewhere in Malaysia, and the bank would have to pay for it by law."

Exhibit B

A council has defended spending £12,000 for a hologram "virtual receptionist" to greet visitors, saying it is cheaper than employing a person to do the job.

The “virtual assistant”, which has been named Shanice, will appear to sit behind a desk and greet visitors, but is actually projected onto a see-through screen.

Brent council, which is believed to be the first to use the technology, says that having a virtual employee will save £17,000 compared to a human receptionist, adding that Shanice can also be reprogrammed.....Shanice will direct visitors at the £90million civic centre wanting to register a birth or death, apply for a marriage licence or arriving for their big day, or attending to apply for citizenship.

The council boasts that “unlike a real receptionist, she's also got a 'touch screen' function”, meaning people can key in the reason for visit and receive a tailor made presentation.

However, Alison Hopkins, budget and finance spokeswoman for the opposition Lib Dems, told the Evening Standard: "There have been complaints about signage in Brent’s new civic centre but this is a startlingly expensive way of solving the problem.

A Sporting Curate's Egg

As Saturday bled into Sunday this weekend, the bottom three sides in the Premiership were Arsenal, Swansea and Cardiff, and Nathan Cleverly had lost his WBO world light heavy weight title over just four rounds in Cardiff.

Hugh sending me a text telling me that Colliers Wood walloped Croydon six nil in the FA Cup didn't really take the edge off the pain.

On the right hand side of the ledger, I got an email from Herne Hill Harriers yesterday:

Its been a great summer for the club with our boys winning the Ebbisham League and our U13/15 boys and girls teams winning our Youth Development League Division so that next year will be amongst the elite top six clubs in the South of England. We were also nominated as Athletics Weekly’s club of the month for July.

So hats off to the Bomber who contributed points to these achievements over 200m, in the 4x100m relay, and with the javelin.

How do you sleep?

I had thought that nothing could ever surpass Opium Jukebox's Bhangra Sex Pistols covers in my affections, but the Rockabye Baby! lullaby rendtions of prince are number one with a bullet, thanks Frankie.

I was working part time in a five-and-dime
My boss was Mr. McGee
He told me several times that he didn't like my kind
Cause I was a bit too leisurely

http://www.rockabyebabymusic.com/media/blfa_files/9692/02_Raspberry_Beret.mp3

Decisions

I am tempted to subscribe to Box Nation today so I can watch the Cleverly Kovalev fight from Cardiff later tonight. The trouble is that I'm out thiis evening. Will I have the willpower to come back home from the pub for twenty past ten? Here's the whole card. There's no way I'll get back for Enzo Maccarinelli at 8:30 that's for sure.

As I have to sign up for a month, it would mean that I'll also get Mayweather v Alvarez on September 14. Dunno, The jury's still out.

Clairy Browne and the Bangin' Rackettes

It is an inflexible rule of mine to approve of surnamesakes (if that is a neologism I have enriched the language) and thus present for your listening pleasure (drum roll) Clairy Browne and the Bangin' Rackettes.

On Love Letter (lead single from the new album) our Clairy deploys as many backing singers as chords which is as it should be. "Three chords, six strings, twelve bars, that swings" to quote myself.

Clairy: The opening line of Love Letter grabs you by the balls. It is about a filthy frustration, it is saying – I want you, I want you to do bad things to me, I don’t care if you don’t want me, I have nothing to lose, for good or for bad or for worse or for better. It is an electric song to sing because the tension boils just beneath the surface and then breaks out into vocal moments that are so full of yearning and desire, so raw, that you just can’t help but stand to attention.

Myself: Crikey!

Prism of Light

Katie Leone is playing the last Friday Jazz Evening of Abbeyfest tomorrow.

Strictly these jazz evenings should be called occasional originals interspersed with early to mid 70s Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye covers ("Talking Book" thru "Songs in the Key of Life" and "What's Going On?" thru "Got to Give it Up" respectively) evenings but they are none the worse for that.

Come along. I will but you a sarsaparilla..... (sings) I used to go out to parties and hang around, 'cause I was too nervous to really get down.

LOUDNESS IN THE NOVEL

Some novels feel louder than others, yet reading is typically a silent process. From this paradox arises this exploration of a text’s ability to be loud or quiet (and thereby exhibit dynamic variation). As a starting point, we will attempt to quantify textual loudness by studying the words that tend to occur within loud dialogue – dialogue that is cried, exclaimed, shouted, roared, or screamed. When, for instance, in Alice in Wonderland we encounter the sentence, ‘“Are their heads off?” shouted the Queen’, we will focus on the words and punctuation inside the quotations (“Are,” “their,” “heads,” “off,” and the question mark) as typical of the semantics of loudness. The project will make use of the Literary Lab’s corpus of 19th century English novels to generate a large sample of loud dialogue and vehement exclamations in order to ask questions such as: Does loud dialogue have its own unique lexicon? What does this lexicon say about loudness and English culture, and how does it change over time? Does it occur most densely within dialogue, or narration – or dramatic scripts? As these questions demonstrate, literary loudness naturally taps into issues of literary form, affect, and historical change.

What ever did we do before the Stanford Literary Lab and their wonderful projects?

The fastest gun in the South

An armed police officer who had sex with a married woman while on duty kept his job after arguing that he could still reach his gun because it was attached to his trousers around his ankles.

Pc Shaun Jenkins, 36, met the woman while he was on patrol and took her to his house, where they had intercourse as his colleague waited outside for 40 minutes in their car.The officer was originally allowed to keep his job, but was sacked for misconduct after the husband of the woman complained.

Gwent Police said his misconduct was made worse by him leaving his loaded pistol on a table during the encounter.

However, Pc Jenkins appealed successfully, saying the disciplinary procedure had been mishandled. An appeals panel also upheld his claim that he was always in reach of the pistol because it was in his holster, attached to his trousers.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission yesterday upheld his reinstatement, although it expressed surprise at the panel’s decision.

Pc Jenkins, who has been decorated for bravery three times, was taken off firearms duty but remains a neighbourhood policeman in South Wales. An IPCC spokesman said no further action could be taken against him because the disciplinary action had been mishandled.

Tom Davies, the head of the IPCC in Wales, said he was bemused by some of the appeal panel’s findings. “The finding that the gun was never out of Pc Jenkins’ direct and immediate control because it was in a holster, attached to his trousers, which were attached to him, albeit around his ankles, is surprising."

Anyone who read this story this morning without laughing must have a heart of stone. Another noble entry in the annals of the nonpareil Police in Wales, for all human life is here.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

El Pitbul

The Bluebirds last night completed the record £9.5m capture of Chilean international Gary Medel as Malky Mackay made his most mouth-watering signing yet.

Medel will be the hard man of the Cardiff midfield as they embark on their debut Premier League season, with English officials sure to be having a few sleepless nights over the coming months.

The 26-year-old was sent off four times last season alone.

One video shows Medel sent from the field during a Copa del Rey match against Atletico Madrid that resulted in the new Bluebird remonstrating with stricken victim Diego Costa before being forcibly removed from the field by team-mates.

As he is departing the pitch, Medel launches a violent kick at a plastic chair located at pitchside, sending the temporary seating flying towards two police officers watching from the sidelines.

In a separate incident, Medel was sent off for slapping new Swansea City recruit Jose Canas during a match with Real Betis - a rivalry that is sure to add extra spice to the forthcoming South Wales derbies in November and February next year.

Gary Medel was born to become a folk hero at Cardiff City.

Are you experienced?

The Dr Who Experience: I wouldn't have gone without kids but it was pretty good.

Flowrider

You now add my name, along with Alex and the Bomber, along with Tony Hawk, Sean Silveira and Nick Nguyen to the list of keen and expert Flowriders thanks to Cardiff International White Water.

Frank Sinatra Has a Cold

To celebrate eight decades of publication Esquire magazine had promised to bring us it's eighty greatest ever stories in ten volumes of eight pieces each (Icons passim). The effort seems to have fizzled out, temporarily I hope, after three though.

To slake my thirst I have dug into the archives to discover that on the magazine's 70th anniversary Gay Talese's 1966 Frank Sinatra Has a Cold was declared the best piece they ever published and that five years later they anointed the seven best ever up to that time.

Thus http://www.esquire.com/features/page-75/greatest-stories will have to take the strain until the Esquire Eighty project kicks into gear again, even though I have already read three of them in the 2013 vintage collection.

(Interesting to see Harlan Ellison (Icons passim) turn up in a cameo in the Sinatra story.)

The last post

We are sorry to tell you that your Virgin Active Cardiff Health & Racquet club will be closing on 23 August 2013 at 2pm.
Our nearest clubs are Bridgend, Cwmbran, Weston Super Mare, Glamorgan or Bristol.

Alternatively, please use our club finder to find your nearest club to you.
If you require any further assistance, please contact us.

I will have to find a plan B next time I'm in Wales it seems. Perhaps the WRU cryotherapy chamber?

Attention on the beach and promenade

We are going back to Wales for a spell later this morning. Cardiff Bay Beach. Who knew?

functional strength

This is not helping with my motivation to get to the gym today.

Who?

So Malcolm Tucker is the new Dr Who.  If they can only get him to write and read the opening crawl for the upcoming Star Wars Episode VII as well my life will be complete.

RideLondon

RideLondon came along Worple Road and then up Wimbledon Hill Road today.

It was pretty humbling to watch the professionals on Wimbledon Hill. I've cycled it once or twice but try to avoid it and we even got a cab up it the other week rather than walk up to the village.

Maybe if I weighed 140 pounds ......

Gangs of Tooting Broadway

One for the film round in Monday's quiz at the Antelope perhaps. Maybe I'll watch it online. It is a long way from Wolfie Smith, that's for sure.

It is strange to think of Elizabeth Henstridge essentially going straight from this geezer movie (filmed up the road, innit bruv) to Avengers spin-off Agents of Shield in the USA (swear down).

the chorus of the satyrs

Myself: The metaphysical comfort - with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us -that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable - this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of the satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.

Prodnose: Eh?

Myself: It's Nietzsche (Icons passim), from The Birth of Tragedy. Polly Gibbons and Samara are on the bill at Abbeyfest tonight and according to the WBI time machine they both played here in 2005 as well, so my mind naturally turned to eternal recurrence.

Prodnose: Naturally, and no doubt will do again and again numberless times.

Myself: Ho ho very satirical.

Naval gazing

James and Andy turned up at the 'Nonce last night, and yes we did celebrate Black Tot Day with rum chasers on rounds.

I am so hung over this morning I seem to be hallucinating a Hong Kong action movie finale in which  Michelle Yeoh, Cynthia Rothrock, and Danny Baker (5 seconds in) battle hordes of evil henchmen.