Thirty odd years ago, I was working on the Strand. One lunchtime I wandered into a bookshop, and found someone I vaguely recognised talking to a handful of people about Charles Dickens.
It was Miriam Margolyes. She did a couple of readings, and was very, very good at doing the characters.
I bought a copy of Hard Times, and I’ve been a bit of a Dickens fan-boy ever since
Anyway, this is great
I thought this was a fantastic film. It was fascinating in the way that DJT has a dark fascination.
From a political point of view…. the shocking think about it was that it wasn’t that shocking.
Marvellous news. ‘The job of a lifetime’: Line of Duty to return for seventh season
England and Scotland….both got ex-Chelsea guys as managers. Both top of their groups. Just saying.
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
I thought Riot Women was great. There was a lot going on, but as Rabbi Lionel Blue used to say…isn’t that a bit like life?
Watched: Riot Women Season 1 🍿
It’s very Beckham-esque the way that Rashford only needs half a yard to whip a cross over
It is, clearly, coming home. ⚽
Some nice quotes in the Cramps article in Vintage Rock magazine this month
“There’s a million sides to Ivy and I just love all of them,” cooed Lux.
And Ivy wrote this in the notes for Lux’s funeral - Lux was"creature from another world, with one foot already out of this dimension,”
AI just described the image on my last post as a “child-like drawing”
I mean….it is very child-like, in fact most children over the age of 3 could do an awful lot better, but AI is normally so polite ! 😡😡
Scored my first own goal for a few weeks.
I can’t think of another sport where own goals are a feature. Players of basketball, cricket, rugby, golf, netball, baseball and ice hockey will never have quite that feeling.
I’m getting attached photos through from Bluesky in my micro.blog feed now :)
(You can’t see too many photos of the Chelsea ’60s/’70s team)
Thoughts on Don’t Look Now at Salisbury Playhouse
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it’s very tense and very dark
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it’s well worth seeing
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you can’t quite get the “drowning in beauty” in Venice thing in the theatre
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I’d be interested to see the film
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I’ve been to Fowey, it was very sunny and cheerful. I can’t imagine the gothic and gloomy Daphne du Maurier living there
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….perhaps I need to go in the off-season
Thoughts on going to a silent disco in Salisbury Cathedral
- the Big Church is a surprisingly good venue for a silent disco
- after a few minutes it didn’t seem particularly weird to be dancing and drinking amongst the tombs of Bishops
- it did, though, cross my mind that it was odd to be wandering around on my way to the loo, mildly sozzled, within a few yards of the Magna Carta
- this probably reflects my low-church agnosticism, and reverence for all things lefty
- the privacy of the headphones has a disinhibiting effect. It does have a dance-like-nobody’s-watching feel
- I’m #TeamGreenChannel (pop), rather than Blue (rock and indie) or Red (‘urban’), apart from the reggae
- but it was great being able to switch when there was a boring song
- it was fun being able to watch people doing the Macarena, while listening to something else
- although I do actually love the Macarena
- it’s not at all silent
- part of the fun was listening to people singing along
- especially on the big anthem-y songs. Hundreds of people singing along to Oasis, unaccompanied, was fab
I didn’t get round to getting a poppy this year so I chipped in a few quid here
Pic is Klatschmohn by Christian Rohlfs from Wikimedia
BBC ‘100% fake news’, says Donald Trump’s press secretary
Explains why they keep telling me that the Arsenal are at the top of the table ⚽
I looked up Dead Christ in the Tomb, and I’m entirely with Anna
In 1867 the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and his second wife. Anna, honeymooned in Basel. There, in the city’s Kunstmuseum, the newlyweds saw a painting that made a big impression on them both. Anna, who was pregnant, could hardly bear to look at it. But Fyodor was so transfixed that his wife, observing that “his agitated face had a kind of dread in it”, eventually led him away.
The painting that had such a “crushing impact” on Dostoevsky (who went on to write about it in his novel The Idiot) was Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb a lifesize depiction of Christ’s battered
By Katherine Harvey in last Saturday’s Times
🚌 #TodayILearned that Ctrl-Shift-G, G (the ctrl and shift and G keys all together, then G on its own) lands you in the Commit message box in VS Code
Tend to agree
What makes these unit tests so bad ? Two things: 1) LLMs write way too many unit tests and 2) the tests are extremely frequently just verifying what the code does, not validating what the code should do.
John Cleese on the telly just now said that another prominent actress, who had been starring in an Ayckbourn play, was offered the role of Sybil but turned it down because she didn’t think it was funny. I wonder who it was?
[When he settled in London, Voltaire’s] only major problem seems to have been getting used to the local sense of humour. Instead of being subtly witty, Londoners talked surreal nonsense.
Plus ça change!
Currently reading: 1000 Years of Annoying the French by Stephen Clarke 📚
