A Shifty-Eyed Wifeswapping Weasel!

An outpouring of grief has coincided with Nick Cave on the shuffle. “Give ‘em hell in heaven” – do these people know what they are saying and what sort of man they are saying it about. We idolise and idealise the most unsuitable people these days. Enough of this! The man is not worth it.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream tonight which is of course my favourite Shakespeare play because I “did it” at school – for the exam and everything. It was lucky I didn’t do the other choice that year which was Julius Caesar, yuk. With me Shakespeare is all or nothing. Comedies -brilliant! Tragedies – er – tragic. Only yesterday I discovered that The Tempest is considered a Comedy so where does that leave Forbidden Planet? Maybe it was a forerunner of Police Squad. Daughter is now obsessed with Much Ado About Nothing after she asked for it when I was going through boxes in the Attic. She doesn’t really get the plot or even understand much of the language but Michael Keaton and Ben Elton were quite funny and it was filmed beautifully. This came out at about the time I realised that I could just about follow a Shakespeare play without having to have York Notes close by. Twelfth Night was on the other day which we actually performed at school – well the bits with Malvolio and the other posh Mechanicals. My daughter now has a new game of putting us on the spot. She found the free Acrobat reader disk I got at some show years ago and discovered that it has the complete works of Shakespeare on it. She will show us the Dramatis Personae page and ask us which play it is from. My wife and I prefer Charlie And Lola at the moment.

I am at last back into The Ancestor’s Tale, though as I left it in the middle of the worms, it took not a small amount of effort to get back to speed. Actually, worms are quite interesting. I wasn’t aware that the dorsal/ventral mirroring between worms and later animals is probably due to organisms evolving to swim on their backs rather than because they have gone through an evolutional rearrangement of their internal anatomy. Actually it is obvious when it is mentioned but you need to know that it occurred to even start thinking about it. What a boring paragraph. Maybe it isn’t; the relevant description in the book wasn’t boring at the time I read it. There is actually quite an air of tension about the tale as I am dying to know how it all ends – er – begins.

Some amusing signs for you. This has made me think of how complicated life has become and how things like this are reactions against that complexity but somehow add to it as well. We all live beyond our means and I mean that more than just financially. Some weekends just seem to whistle by without stopping when all you could do in the week before was look forward to the long hours sitting in a chair reading a book or doing a crossword. We have to fill every minute with some leisure activity and though we do this do we ever feel refreshed or made better by it. I think an hour reading about worms made me happier than anything else we did this weekend. Well almost! Reduce, Simplify, Reflect!

I am wondering whether the flurries we are having here are enough to justify going home before it gets dark. As most of my journey is on the motorway, I am probably safe but the drivers stuck on Bodmin Moor at the weekend probably thought so as well.