I also went to see my old pals Christopher the Giant and Hobnob in Salisbury Museum
The Salisbury Museum is outstanding and I urge you to go there at once’. Bill Bryson, in ‘Notes from a Small Island'
This is Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Crucifixion’ in the cloisters of Salisbury Cathedral
My dad was a welder. He did a bit of a fix-up on it. Bless him.
Very much enjoyed What the Night Brings.
Spotted a minor muck-up. Michael Healey’s name changed to Martin Healey at one point. I’m 99.9% sure I only noticed because my much-missed father-in-law was Michael Healy.
Editing is hard.
Finished reading: What the Night Brings by Mark Billingham 📚
The 53 best series on BBC iPlayer to stream right now
A good list of stuff to watch on the Iplayer
My Crucial Track for 27 April 2026 - “The Broad Majestic Shannon” by Liam Clancy
Post a song written or co-written by one of your favorite songwriters.
Shane MacGowan, sung by Liam Clancy
It’s the sort of song people criticise as being nostalgic and sentimental, but I think ‘nostalgic and sentimental ' is a big part of being human.
“The Broad Majestic Shannon” by Liam Clancy on Apple Music
This is from Crucial Tracks. My profile is here.
Thoughts on yesterday’s game
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
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we were great for 20 minutes, then it felt like we were grinding it out a bit
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it was the best I’ve seen Fernandez play
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the ‘new’ Wembley stadium is growing on me, even though it’s still horrible to get to and from
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a young friend of mine says his South American girlfriend would have definitely heard of the famous Wembley Stadium….but only as a music venue
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Leeds vs Chelsea at Wembley. For an old git like me, it’s a great fixture
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both sets of fans were obnoxious to each other. Who knew so many Leeds fans' fathers had their own guns?
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according to a chum of mine, they sung that song even when we’d been in different divisions for years
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Sanchez was brilliant
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Palmer doesn’t look fit. I thought to start with he was defensively rubbish, but then he did a couple of great tackles and interceptions, so I take that back
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I’m sure he’ll be pleased
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it was quite fun having the Semi Final on the same day as the London Marathon, but it made public transport a bit busy
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I now have distance envy
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‘When the Blues go steaming in’ was a bit odd when the Blues were standing on the Wembley escalators, holding the handrails
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we were standing from Wembley to Bond Street, and then from Waterloo to Fareham. I think that puts all those marathon runners in the shade, tbh
I saw Andy Hamilton at Salisbury Playhouse last night. Very good.
To my knowledge he’s the only person to pick Blue is the Colour on Desert Island Discs
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
He made a joke about it not being worth remembering the name of Spurs managers, as they don’t last very long.
I wondered why he didn’t change that to Chelsea managers, in the light of this week’s news. He’s famous for particularly topical, news-y comedy.
Would it be too painful? He’s ‘proper Chels’.
Or would it disrupt the flow of a memorized two-hour-plus routine? Too much psychological baggage.
Or would it be a case of ‘too much things to say’? Would it have derailed the show into being all about the Blues. I’d have been interested, but I’m guessing the rest of the audience wouldn’t be.
It was an odd moment. It was for me anyway.
Andy Hamilton at Penguin Books
I was sat on the Tube the other day opposite a bloke in shorts who had ‘Mum’ tattooed on one knee, and ‘Dad’ tattooed on the other.
I don’t have any tattoos but I’m often curious about other people’s. Why did he have those on his kneecaps specifically? How did he he decide who got the right knee and who got the left?
If I wasn’t quite so English I might have asked
Delighted that PSReadLine seems to be installed and on by default on Windows servers. The POC server I was mucking about on went down last night, and I thought I’d lost all the command history, which I was kind of depending on
$(Get-PSReadLineOption).HistorySavePath
…shows where the ‘treasure’ lies
While I was reading this I thought how great it was that when a writer sits down to write a book that book can be about anything.
It can be about Romans or rabbits, or attack ships on the shoulder of Orion, or whatever.
This one is a time slip murder mystery about a slightly flakey woman with a dysfunctional family and a random waiter.
I really enjoyed it…but the thing I thought about a book being about anything was slightly undermined by the first bit of the Acknowledgements, which I just read
Getting a book onto shelves is hard when that book doesn’t fit into a clear publishing category…
Finished reading: Vivian Dies Again by Caroline Hulse 📚
How to set up a scheduled task running as a managed service account
I tried to do this both in the GUI and in powershell, but whatever I did I couldn’t get past the GUI asking for a password, or this error when I ran the task
Task Scheduler did not launch task "\matttesting" because user "chelseafc.co.uk\msa$" was not logged on when the launching conditions were met. User Action: Ensure user is logged on or change the task definition to allow launching when user is logged off.
The solution to this problem was to use the old schtasks executable.
schtasks /create /TN 'matt testing using schtasks' /SC DAILY /ST 16:45 /RU 'chelseafc.co.uk\msa$' /RP '' /TR C:\temp\matt_testing.bat /RL Highest
Please enter the run as password for chelseafc.co.uk\msa$:
My Crucial Track for 21 April 2026 - “Famine” by Kate Nash
What is your favourite cover song?
“Famine” by Kate Nash
This is certainly my favourite new cover song. It’s Kate Nash (who had a hit with Foundations and was in Glow on Netflix) doing Sinead O’Connor.
The instrumentation is different, and there’s an added verse, and it’s great. I thought Sinead O’Connor was marvellous, and it’s nice to have her work re-interpreted.
Nash makes points in the video about how English people are ignorant about Irish history….guilty as charged, really.
“Famine” by Kate Nash on Apple Music
This is from Crucial Tracks. My profile is here.
Lots of Spurs fans in transit this morning. There’s a feeling of waiting outside the Headmaster’s office, to take their punishment
I almost feel sorry for them
Almost.
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
Interesting as always from @iandunt.bsky.social , however ‘Rejoin’ is a rubbish word.
In the same way that ‘Brexiteer’ sounded more swash-buckling and exciting than ‘Remainer’, ‘Return’, for example, is a lot cooler than ‘Rejoin’.
Batman returns, the thin white duke returns, the magnificent seven return etc
These words matter, imho.
I’m delighted for Super Frankie Lampard.
Someone wrote that he’ll always be Frank Lampard of Chelsea, and I totally agree.
I took this last night when I was out plodding around Salisbury.
I like the way the shop window reflections work with the model of the Ralph Feinnes, who I vaguely remember from school.
I really enjoyed 2026 🍿
I’ve read a couple of reviews basically saying it’s not serious enough for serious times, but when it gets to Mr Trump I like that it’s about the silly and the trivial side of him.
The words to “All things bright and beautiful” were published in 1848.
They were written by Cecil Frances Alexander, who lived in Strabane. 1848 was the time of the Irish ‘famine’, which makes the line about “the poor man at the gate” quite dark.
To be fair, the famine may not have had such an impact in Strabane at the time the verse was written - I don’t know.
The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate
Reminded of this by Kate Nash’s new version of Sinead O’Connor’s song
Love the Star’s headline, although you do need to be of a certain age, and have watched UK Sunday afternoon telly
At 8:01 PM on April 6th he is temporarily distracted by videos on the internet. He posts a colour video of New York from the early 20th Century and writes: “New York City, 1929!” Not long afterwards, at 1:06pm on April 7th, he threatens genocide
I don’t agree with eveverything that Mr Dunt says here:
…but I can’t disagree with very much of it
