Spanish Guitar

If I could do this I might cry, too.

The Beautiful South

I had forgotten all about them! I loved them in the 90s, without ever really realising I did. I wasn't 'into' music then. I just knew what I liked, not who I liked; if that makes any sense. They had a few female vocalists over the years. Jacqui Abbot has perhaps the loveliest voice but my favourite is still Alison Wheeler, who sings in the video below. Fans can't get together without arguing over that as far as I can tell.



The band split up a few years ago, but some of the members reformed as New Beautiful South.

Only in Britain

Where else in the world would the same circumstances coalesce so perfectly to make the feel-good story of the year? Two drunken morons pick a fight first with someone dressed as Spiderman and then with two men dressed as women who turned out to be cage fighters in fancy dress.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/8296190.stm

Any report that has in it: "After throwing a punch at him, Gardner and then Fender are both quickly floored by Mr Lerwell, wearing a short black dress with stockings and suspenders" has to be worth reading.

Revive the semi-colon!

I have read a lot of books and been moved by some truly wonderful passages of writing; but nothing — nothing — that can reach the heights this one paragraph from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway soared to. I thought I had stumbled on a hidden gem, but apparently it's been spotted by a lot of other people too. Here it is:

As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet from Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of her struggles has become famous.

I don't know about you but I don't exhale during that sentence. I am led through it, my toes floating just above the ground, till I am put back down again gently and I can breathe once more.

Why does it do that to me and to a lot of other people who read it? There is only one period and that is at the very end. One sentence 107 words in length: a stream of thought uninterrupted by anything so vulgar as a stop.

Do you have any idea of the artistry required to write not only that one paragraph but an entire book with that lightness of touch? I don't. I can only guess at it. But while I'd not copy Woolf's style, let alone her writing, I can and have learnt so much from her use of punctuation. I used to think they were mere mechanical devices, holding sentences up like rivets, but they are more like the deft suggestions of form you get from an impressionists brush; at least in skilled hands.

I use semi-colons a lot in my writing, though not as much as I could. The reason I do is Virginia Woolf.

Then there's the elegant hyphen — which is under assault as most modern keyboards ask you to hold down the 'alt' key or, as with my laptop, the 'alt' and 'fn' keys while entering 0, 1, 5, 1. (Now there's commitment to the cause for you!)

Mustn't forget the colon: it pushes you on into the sentence with a great big shove in the back. It is a great promiser of things to come; a top-hatted impresario who draws back the curtain and beckons you in to the wonders that lie beyond.

I do feel sorry for the humble and overworked comma, though. The comma, along with the simple full stop, is increasingly asked to do the work of the semi-colon, dash and colon. In America, it is even made to take on roles for which it is not needed: the last comma in a list is not needed. 'And' does that job just fine on its own.

So, you see, punctuation is beautiful; or can be: an art that oils the space between words; that dictates rhythm so that the line between writing on a page and music becomes blurred.

You'll have to excuse me: I am becoming quite emotional.

If Stephen King made pianos . . .

. . . this is the piano he'd make:

One comment a friend of mine made was that musically it's better than jazz. I liked that so much I wished I had said it. By the end of today, I will have done.

One Day Like This

"Throw those curtains wide, one day like this a year would see me right."

Alarming Escalation!

If you haven't seen my old blog about the bovine conspiracy, you may do so here. Thousands of us all around the world who have tumbled the cows spend hundreds of thousands of hours between us, each week, monitoring media sources so we can warn the world of an all-out attack before it is too late.

We in the bovine conspiracy community, known as Cow Watchers, are becoming more and more concerned at the increasing incidents of cow violence toward humans. And we were alarmed, to say the least, that they have stepped up their campaign with an attack on former British cabinet minister, David Blunkett, on his 62nd birthday. For those who do not know, the most sickening aspect of the attack is that Mr Blunkett is blind. The cows went for his guide dog! The dog's fine — his training kicked in — but I think you will agree that this marks a terrifying escalation in hostilities, for he is still a member of Her Majesty's goverment and what happened at the weekend is tantamount to a declaration of war. Mr Blunkett has a broken rib but it could have been much worse. In an effort to protect his dog he was trampled. Mr Blunkett reports that if the cow had fallen on him he would have surely been killed.

I don't want to spread panic among the general population, but we could be only weeks away from enslavement.