Modesty Forbids

We won the quiz in the Antelope last night, but spending our fifty quid voucher will have to wait. There's no event next Monday because it is a Bank Holiday.

We won it on Monday April 15th as well, then had to take a sabbatical the following week on Easter Monday.

This means that come Monday May 13th we will have been reigning champs for all but a month.

Loyle Carner

I stumbled across Profile on Radio 4 about Loyle Carner: rapper and cookery teacher. Could anything be more up my street?

Early days but I like what "Alexa, play songs by Loyle Carner" turns up.

"They ask why every fxxking song the fucking same, And I tell them it's 'cause ain't nothing changed" is a great lyric.

the giddy social whirlwind

The Surrey Food Festival was called off yesterday. The wind had blown stuff over in the morning. Whatever happened to the Blitz spirit? We retired to the Tap Tavern instead.



If I hadn't gone to Richmond however I wouldn't have known that Edmond de Bergerac was on in the theatre there this week. I love all things Cyrano so I will try and catch it if I can find time.

the giddy social whirl

I am off to the Surrey Food Festival in Richmond this afternoon.

You are probably underwhelmed but it gives me something to write here.

π

After yesterday, we have yet another Welsh Maths Icon, William Jones, born in Anglesey in 1675, was the first recorded mathematician to use the symbol π in its present sense.

The Man Who Invented Pi

The history of the constant ratio of the circumference to the diameter of any circle is as old as man's desire to measure; whereas the symbol for this ratio known today as π (pi) dates from the early 18th century. Before this the ratio had been awkwardly referred to in medieval Latin as: quantitas in quam cum multiflicetur diameter, proveniet circumferencia (the quantity which, when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference).

It is widely believed that the great Swiss-born mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-83) introduced the symbol π into common use. In fact it was first used in print in its modern sense in 1706 a year before Euler's birth by a self-taught mathematics teacher William Jones (1675-1749) in his second book Synopsis Palmariorum Matheseos, or A New Introduction to the Mathematics based on his teaching notes.

....... read on.....

Robert Recorde

He did more the just invent =.

A Welshman, Robert Recorde invented the = symbol.

He was also the 1st to use the + symbol whilst adding.

— BenjimanCymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇺🇸🇪🇺🇫🇷 (@TheBengwin) April 24, 2019

Well I never! Robert Recorde; a Welsh Born Icon.

Click

I woke up early this morning, so I started listening to the BBC World Service. There was a show called Click on at about half past five; technological and digital news from around the world.

One of the items on today's episode was about Dame Steve Shirley. The early IT female pioneer (Steve is short for Stephanie) spoke about her career, what she thinks of the tech scene now, she has donated millions of her fortune to charity, her reissued autobiography, and the film that is likely to be made of it; hers is a fascinating story, she arrived Britain in 1939 as a Kindertransport child refugee.

It reminded me that I met her years ago, when she came to talk at a sort of weekend retreat that I went to as part of a private sector/civil service discussion group.

I also met Enoch Powell at a similar bun fight, but that is another story.

Because football … football is about nothing unless it's about something. And what it is about … is football.

Really gutted to end my season with an Ruptured Achilles, gotta work hard and try and come back stronger for next season!!!😢🙏🏾❤️ pic.twitter.com/PXC53WszdH

— Callum Hudson-Odoi (@Calteck10) April 22, 2019

Terrible news about Callum; fingers crossed. Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_tendon_rupture#Treatment.

In other football news, friends were away over Easter and lent me their Arsenal season tickets so I took life-long fan Paul to see Crystal Palace at the Emirates on Sunday. He was delighted when his "Eagles" won 3-2.

We stayed in the ground for a pint afterwards waiting for the crowd to dissipate and for the queue at the tube station to thin. This was when he told me it was only the second occasion in his life that he had seen his beloved Palace live. He couldn't recall the date of the first visit, but he did remember that he was standing in the terraces. That puts his first time before the Taylor Report that introduced all-seater grounds after the Hillsborough disaster, so it must be at least thirty odd years ago.

He owes me big time.

So many destination faces going to so many places

Groggily on waking this morning:

Myself: Alexa, ask Heathrow about flight BA1518.

Alexa: British Airways flight BA 1518 from Chicago to Terminal 3, scheduled to arrive today at 09:05, is expected at 09:25.

Whatever would I do without her.

I am will be off to collect Ben when he gets back from Florida shortly.

The Fields of Athenry

According to my AncestryDNA results I am overwhelmingly descended from people who lived in South West Munster. This has led me to transfer some loyalty to Munster in sport, so I was backing them (to no avail unfortunately) against the Saracens in the European Champions Cup semi-final yesterday.

According to Wikipedia:

Munster fans are known for their silence when a kick is being taken, but also for their boos when an opposing player is waiting under a high ball. Fans repeatedly chant "MUNSTER" or sing "The Fields of Athenry" (an Irish famine song from Galway, Connacht) and "Stand Up and Fight" (from the Broadway musical Carmen Jones.)

That is right, we Munster Fans repeatedly chant "MUNSTER". Whoever would have guessed?

When singing The Fields of Athenry we build to this last verse:

By a lonely harbour wall, she watched the last star fall

As the prison ship sailed out against the sky

Sure she'll wait and hope and pray for her love in Botany Bay

It's so lonely round the fields of Athenry.

There is a section in my online AncestryDNA report called DNA Origins that can be broken down by time slice. My map from 1825 to 1850 is inserted below.

Can you see the faint line from Ireland to Australia? (If you click on the image you will see a larger version.) The line all but lands in Botany Bay! Some other offspring of my forefathers was probably  probably - like the poor boy in the song - transported there as a convict before our branches escaped to Wales.

Here is what the analysts say the dots and lines on the map represent:

The dots represent ancestral birth locations. We collect birth locations and dates from online trees that members of Genetic Communities™ have linked to their AncestryDNA results. We remove locations that are not statistically significant or relevant to a Genetic Community. Then, based on that data, we create maps with large and small dots showing population density at different times.

We use the same data to track migration patterns by comparing birth locations between parents and children. These are reflected by the lines on the map. By looking at changes in migration paths over time, we gain more insight into where and when people moved.

You'll notice the dots change with the time periods. Each dot represents ancestors born during that time. A dot in the middle of a state or country that doesn’t seem to correspond with a population center represents people in trees who had only a state or country listed as a birth location.

faraway, so close

The photo (from Facebook) is the air ambulance landing in Lavender Park after a 15 year old boy was stabbed around the corner in Steers Mead yesterday afternoon.

Steers Mead is less than a mile's walk from my house.

The Old Ruts play the odd home game at Lavender Park on Sunday mornings, and we always see Callum's dad Bismark when they do as he coaches football there at the same time in the cage.

See Knife Crime. See Dan Young RIP.

Nigel Tufnel: It really puts perspective on things though, doesn't it?
David St. Hubbins: Too much. There's too much fxxking perspective now.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

When we were preparing for our English literature O level all those years ago, the teacher announced in one lesson that we had been reading the wrong syllabus. I imagine there would be an outcry today, but back then no-one seemed to care in the slightest about all the time we had wasted.

Anyway, that was the lesson in which "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was yanked out of my life and replaced by "Julius Caesar".

In Our Time was about AMND this week so I listened with attention as we are going to see it in August. This morning I also took advantage of the Bank Holiday to watch the 1999 film. I could have done without the bicycles in that but at at least I won't be under-prepared when we attend the live performance at Merton Hall Park and will still be able to bore everyone to death as usual a la Reg Smeeton "drawing from my vast, though admittedly unresolved catalogue of general know-it-all, facts of interest etc."

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

Helen Hackett at University College London

Tom Healy at the University of Sussex

Alison Findlay at Lancaster University

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Wikipedia

READING LIST:

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Dympna Callaghan (ed.),  A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2016), especially ‘The Great Indian Vanishing Trick: Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Ania Loomba

Richard Dutton (ed.), A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays (Palgrave, 1996)

Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Vol. III: The Comedies (Blackwell, 2003), especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Helen Hackett

Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1986), especially ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’ by Louis Adrian Montrose

Helen Hackett, Writers and Their Work: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (British Council/Northcote House, 1997)

Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths(Oxford University Press, 2009)

Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night (Routledge, 2008), especially ‘Dream-Visions of Elizabeth I’ by Helen Hackett

Jan Kott (trans. Daniela Miedzyrecka and Lillian Vallee), The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Cultural Tradition(Northwestern University Press, 1987)

Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Blackwell, 1989)

William Shakespeare (ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)

William Shakespeare (ed. Peter Holland), A Midsummer Night’s Dream(Oxford University Press, 1994)

William Shakespeare (ed. Stanley Wells), A Midsummer Night’s Dream(Penguin, 2005)

Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 1997)

Susan Wiseman, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1500-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Household Gods

Myself: Alexa, how many households are there in the UK?

Alexa: The United Kingdom has 27 million households.

Isn't it mind-boggling that a smart speaker can answer a question like that? It is correct as well according to the Office for National Statistics.

The reason that I asked, was that in its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, Netflix revealed that in the first four weeks on the service, Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s UCP-produced comic book adaptation of Umbrella Academy was watched by 45 million households (a number which included mine).

I wanted to put 45 million households in context. One and two thirds times all the households in the UK certainly does that.

I am astounded.

Raised highbrow?

I read Carlos Acosta's autobiography about three years ago (Icons passim). It is a terrific book that has now inspired a film Yuli. It doesn't seem to be widely distributed in the UK, but it is on at the HMV Curzon so I will try and catch it in Wimbledon over the Easter weekend.

I saw Rupert Everett's The Happy Prince about the last day of Oscar Wilde at the same venue last year. I thought it was great and was astounded it didn't seem to get a nod for anything come awards season. It is on Netflix now so I recommend you catch up with it if you have a subscription.

Notre Dame

In the 1790s, Notre-Dame suffered desecration during the French Revolution; much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed. In 1804, the cathedral was the site of the Coronation of Napoleon I as Emperor of France.

It is probably gonna take more than a fire to see it off.

We went to see it once when I was in Paris for a rugby international. One of the party was genuinely gephyrophobic, a condition that had been brought on by being blown across lanes in a high sided vehicle by heavy winds on the Severn bridge.

I can distinctly remember him having to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood to race across the Pont d'Arcole, rather than go home without getting on to the Île de la Cité.

I am still amazed we didn't laugh at him. That is how serious it was.

Show Hole

I finished the Umbrella Academy on Netflix yesterday. I suppose that 18 days for a six part series isn't strictly binge-watching. For my next project I am now one episode in to Idris Elba's Turn Up Charlie. I think it got lukewarm reviews but I am rather beguiled by its hang-shaggy-dog-begging.

I was astonished to discover that people I know intended to stay up (or set alarms) to catch the first episode of the last series of Game of Thrones spoiler free in the early hours of this morning. I watched five episodes of the first series in 2014, before taking a five year break.

Perhaps I can catch up with these handy precis ......

I Trawl the Megahertz

I learned from the invaluable Sodajerker podcast of Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon's re-release of I Trawl the Megahertz. It passed me by completely when it came out in 2003, but the 22 minute title track is a bitter-sweet masterpiece, the like of which I haven't heard before. Listen to the podcast for the extraordinary story of its creation.

I am telling myself the story of my life,
stranger than song or fiction.
We start with the joyful mysteries,
before the appearance of ether,
trying to capture the elusive:
the farm where the crippled horses heal,
the woods where autumn is reversed,
and the longing for bliss in the arms
of some beloved from the past.
I said 'Your daddy loves you'.
I said 'Your daddy loves you very much';
he just doesn't want to live with us anymore'.
The plane comes down behind enemy lines
and you don't speak the language.
A girl takes pity on you:
she is Mother Theresa walking among the poor,
and her eyes have attained night vision.
In an orchard, drenched in blue light,
she changes your bandages and soothes you.
All day her voice is balm,
then she lowers you into the sunset.
Hers is the wing span of the quotidian angel,
so her feet are sore from the walk
to the well of human kindness,
but she gives you a name and you grow into it.
Whether a tramp of the low road or a prince,
riding through Wagnerian opera,
you learn some, if not all, of the language.
And these are the footsteps you follow
- the tracks of impossible love.
12 days in Paris,
and I am awaiting for life to start.
In the lobby of the Hotel Charlemagne
they are hanging photographs
of Rap artists and minor royalty.
All cigarettes have been air-brushed from these pictures,
making everyone a liar,
and saving no-one from their folly.
As proud as Lucifer, I do nothing to hide
my kerosene dress and flint eyes
- which with one steady look, are able to restore
to these images their carcinogenic threat.
So what if this is largely bravado?
I have only 12 days in Paris
and I'm waiting for life to start.
I'm setting out my stall behind a sheet of dark hair,
and you, the hostage of crazed hormones,
will be driven to say:
'I am the next poet laureate
and she is the cherry madonna,
and all of the summer is hers.'
At first I don't notice you,
or the colour of your hair,
or your readiness to laugh.
I am tying a shoelace,
or finding the pavement fascinating
when the comet thrills the sky.
Ever the dull alchemist.
I have before me all the necessary elements:
it is their combination that eludes me.
Forgive me ... I am sleepwalking.
I am jangling along to some song of the moment,
suffering its sweetness,
luxuriating in its feeble approximation of starlight.
Meanwhile there is a real world ...
trains are late, doctors are breaking bad news,
but I am living in a lullaby.
You might be huddled in a doorway on the make,
or just getting by, but I don't see it.
You are my one shot at glory.
Soon I will read in your expression
warmth, encouragement, assent.
From an acorn of interest
I will cultivate whole forests of affection.
I will analyse your gestures
like centuries of scholars
pouring over Jesus' words.
Anything that doesn't fit my narrow interpretation
I will carelessly discard.
For I am careless... I'm shameless... and -
('Mayday, Mayday, watch the needle leave the dial')
I am reckless,
I am telling myself the story of my life.
Soon, I will make you a co-conspirator:
if I am dizzy I will call it rapture;
if I am low I will attribute it to your absence,
noting your tidal effect upon my moods.
Oblivious to the opinions of neighbours
I will bark at the moon like a dog.
In short, I'm asking to be scalded.
It is the onset of fever.
Yesterday they took a census.
Boasting, I said 'I live two doors down from joy.'
Today, bewildered and sarcastic, I phone them and ask
'Isn't it obvious? This slum is empty.'
I am listening to the face in the mirror
but I don't think I believe what she's telling me.
Her words are modern, but her eyes have been weeping
in gardens and grottoes since the Middle Ages.
This is the aftermath of fever.
I cool the palms of my hands upon the bars
of an imaginary iron gate.
Only by an extreme act of will can I avoid
becoming a character in a country song:
'Lord, y'gave me nothin', then y'took it all away.'
These are the sorrowful mysteries,
and I have to pay attention.
In a chamber of my heart sits an accountant.
He is frowning and waving red paper at me.
I go to the window for air.
I catch the scent of apples,
I hunger for a taste,
but I can't see the orchard for the rain.
There are two ways of looking at this.
The first is to accept that you are gone,
and to light a candle at the shrine of amnesia.
(I could even cheat).
In the subterranean world of anaesthetics
sad white canoes are forever sailing downstream
in the early hours of the morning.
'Tell the stars I'm coming,
make them leave a space for me;
whether bones, or dust,
or ashes once among them I'll be free.'
It may make a glamorous song
but it's dark train of thought
with too many carriages.
There is, of course,
another way of looking at this:
'Your daddy loves you, ' I said
'Your daddy loves you very much;
he just doesn't want to live with us anymore.'
I am telling myself the story of my life.
By day and night, fancy electronic dishes
are trained on the heavens.
They are listening for smudged echoes
of the moment of creation.
They are listening for the ghost of a chance.
They may help us make sense of who we are
and where we came from;
and, as a compassionate side effect,
teach us that nothing is ever lost.
So... I rake the sky.
I listen hard.
I trawl the megahertz.
But the net isn't fine enough,
and I miss you
- a swan sailing between two continents,
a ghost immune to radar.
Still, my eyes are fixed upon
the place I last saw you,
your signal urgent but breaking,
before you became cotton in a blizzard,
a plane coming down behind enemy lines.

Ain't that something? I think I will go for a lie down now.

Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum

#OnThisDay 1959: Monitor made a short film called Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum, about a burgeoning phenomenon; the audiophile.
This is absolutely wonderful. pic.twitter.com/rqXXXntUSA

— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) April 12, 2019

As if I needed any more convincing that an Echo Link or an Echo Link Amp ought to be on my shopping list considering the cost-me-an-arm-and-a-leg speakers and sub-woofer that have been festering unused all these years.

Black Dog

If you're walking along the beach and you hear Black Shuck's breath behind you, you must not turn around or you'll see his read eyes and you'll be dead in twelve months.

Black Shuck, Old Shuck, Old Shock or simply Shuck is the name given to a ghostly black dog which is said to roam the coastline and countryside of East Anglia, one of many ghostly black dogs recorded in folklore across the British Isles.

All very well but the quote above is all I have got from reading Christopher Howse's Soho in the Eighties. Slim pickings when you think I was already in London then, and I revere the Auberon Waugh/Richard Ingrams/Peter Cook et al triumvirate (? for want of a better word).

The Universe's Greatest Mystery

Evan Davis: Hello. Excitement in Brussels.

Generic European Accent: If there is a big moment for all of us, it is today.

Evan Davis: Finally we get a clear picture of that dark vortex sucking in all time and energy.

Generic European Accent : It feels like really looking at the gates of Hell. At the end of space and time. The point of no return.

Evan Davis: Its not what you might be thinking but a black hole 55 million light years away. Meanwhile, back on earth, across the road in Brussels ....... Brexit.

In general lately BBC current affairs and news coverage has been driving me spare. The bait-and-switch at the start of PM on Radio 4 yesterday afternoon however, made me laugh out loud. Herewith.

Also courtesy of the BBC, here is a documentary following the researchers as they attempted to take the first-ever picture of a black hole, travelling the globe to build a revolutionary telescope that spans planet Earth.

Have I been too hard on Auntie?

Mojo Pork Cubanos

I came back from Cardiff with - among other things - cucumber left over from making a kachumber salad, and a pork butt marinading in John's home made mead and spices.

We also watched a little bit of Chef the movie on Netflix over the weekend. The pork has been cooked and the cucumbers pickled so last night I made Mojo Pork Cubanos, an official recipe created for and made in the film Chef Roy Choi.

Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.

Ben is in Florida with Jane visiting Rayburn and his family over Easter as usual at the moment.

We met in the Merton Apprentice last Thursday evening after work, before I drove to Wales on Friday and he flew out on Saturday.

He was talking about the number - or constant - Φ (phi) and how it appears in the proportions of, among many things, the human body? I said I hadn't heard of it and asked him if it was related to the golden ratio that the ancient Greeks knew about. He hadn't heard of that.

It turns out that Phi and the Golden Ratio are the same thing! Early in the last century a mathematician Mark Barr proposed using the first letter in the name of Greek sculptor Phidias, phi, to symbolize the golden ratio. Amazing eh? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#History

When he is back, perhaps we can get together again, blow the froth off a couple of cold ones, and really start digging into the Fibonacci sequence?

I didn't see this one coming.

an Gorta Mór

Rattling the pots and pans in the kitchen last night after I got back from Cardiff, I commanded "Alexa, play In Our Time" so I could catch up with whatever Melvyn Bragg and chums had been discussing last Thursday. It was The Great Irish Famine.

Wikipedia

The Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór, [anˠ ˈgɔɾˠt̪ˠa mˠoːɾˠ]), or the Great Hunger, was a period in Ireland between 1845 and 1849 of mass starvation, disease, and emigration. With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was primarily spoken, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as An Drochshaol, loosely translated as the "hard times" (or literally, "The Bad Life"). The worst year of the period, that of "Black 47", is known in Irish as Bliain an Drochshaoil. During the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland,] causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%

From what little I have managed to do with my family tree on the Ancestry site I can see that on my mother's side I have great, great, great grandparents James and Margaret Brian; born 1826 and about 1831 respectively in Ireland. Their daughter (also Margaret) was born around 1856 in Cardiff and married William Milton (who was born in 1850 in Somerset). That is where my mum's maiden name comes from.

On his father's side Dad's great grandfather James McDonnell was born in 1831 in Ireland, then married Joanna Griffin who was born in Cardiff. On his mother's side great grandparents Michael McDonald and Joanna Driscoll were both born in Ireland between 1841 and 1845, but their son Michael was born in Cardiff in 1874.

All lived through and fled the Great Hunger I shouldn't be surprised; babes in arms, children, teens, or barely adults.

the apple doesn't fall far from the tree

My sister didn't know, or forgot, that I would be in Wales yesterday helping John move his things out of Skewen.

The logistics of the operation meant we have to store some stuff temporarily in Mum and Dad's. When Caroline drove past thinking no-one should be be home and saw a large van in the drive, she thought there must be a burglary in progress.

Leaving her three children, all under the age of five, strapped in their seats in the car, she strode into the house to confront ........ me in the kitchen making a sandwich.

Foolhardy is a combination of the noun fool and the adjective hardy, meaning "brave" or "bold." Put them together and you’ve got “foolishly brave.” Someone who is foolhardy throws caution to the wind and takes reckless chances. A foolhardy mistake is typically the result of this kind of impulsive behaviour. But foolhardy doesn’t always imply foolishness or stupidity; foolhardy can convey courage and romance, as in the case of a foolhardy passion or desire.

Quite.

Peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich

My brother John is going to come along to Reginald D Hunter on my birthday. It will be exactly a year to the day since he took me to Taylor Swift, a friend of my nieces having dropped out.

I was droning on and on about my idea of pre-booking one interesting event each calendar month as we were driving from Cardiff to Skewen and explaining that I had already banked events up to August.

When you are taking the M4 on the way from Cardiff to Skewen, you pass junction 37 which is signposted for Pyle and Porthcawl.

The Festival

Every September thousands of Elvis fans descend on the Welsh seaside town of Porthcawl for a unique celebration of The King.

The feature events are the Official Shows taking place in the magnificent Grand Pavilion. These include The Elvies, the World's leading award Show for Elvis Tribute Artists.

In addition, The Hi Tide hosts over 100 shows over the weekend, many with free admission.

Finally, over twenty venues in and around the Town form the Fringe Festival, making Porthcawl the largest Elvis event in Europe.

Fate played the straight man, and September is now sorted as well.

"each month", "every month" or "once a month"?

I am putting meat on the bones of my plan to have one interesting night out booked in advance "each month", "every month" or "once a month".

Fiddler on the Roof has already done April's duty, I have got the Mad Professor sorted in the Hideaway for May, the Shakespeare in the (Merton Hall) Park for August.

They aren't booked yet, but I am minded to see Reginald D Hunter - Facing the Beast in the Shepherd's Bush Empire on June 22 (my birthday), with ExpeRience: The science of music taking the strain for July at the Royal Institution on the tenth.

September can wait.

The future could be good

"It was a bit of a fluke!" 😉

Ruben Loftus-Cheek says that him and Callum Hudson-Odoi have spent years of hard work to start in a Premier League game together.

Report and highlights as #CFC continue their 100-per-cent league record against #BHAFC 👉 https://t.co/vdmtOxAS7y pic.twitter.com/EpbVjOqAQB

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) April 3, 2019

Callum Hudson-Odoi impresses on first Premier League start to help Chelsea ease past Brighton, says Jim White in the Torygraph.

I don't know that I have ever read Jim White with attention before, but it seems that "Hudson-Odoi skipped past Knockaert as if he were barely there and fizzed an invitation of a cross towards the near post".

Fizzed an invitation of a cross is Tyrian purple prose.

Sunrise, Sunset

Off to the Playhouse last night for Trevor Nunn's widely praised revival of Fiddler on the Roof. The seating in the circle is certainly steep. Every time Teyve raised his eyes to heaven and spoke to God he seemed to be looking straight at me.

I have booked up an open air Midsummer Night's Dream in Merton Hall Park in August as
part of my new scheme to make sure I get out to an event at least once a month.

the spotlight is mine

I tried replacing the GU5.3 light bulbs in the bathroom yesterday. The new ones I put in don't work at all.

Reading around the issue, it seems that there are issues around halogen versions of the bulbs, LED versions and transformers that look to be well beyond my pay grade.

I think I need to get an electrician to look at it.

Bowen

Torygraph

BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen reveals he has bowel cancer after he was tested despite having no symptoms.

I was in primary school (de la Salle) with Jeremy Bowen, so I wish him all the best. He was a couple of years older and his brother Nicholas was in my class. As Nicholas Browne and Nicholas Bowen, we were all but anagrams of each other.

I bumped into the two of them years ago in Twickenham at an England Wales game.