It's Still A Funny Old World

I've been away from these pages for a few weeks. Apologies to my regular readers - yes there are a few of them - a very few. I note that the last time I wrote, I was mildly despairing of the world at large but happy in my own skin. Well the world at large has got worse - who would have guessed that Trump's VP would turn out to be an even bigger **** than the Donald himself. Yale Law School must be so proud.

But enough of such whining - you don't need me to tell you that the United States has fallen under the spell of narcissistic sociopaths. Instead let's talk about some of the good stuff. The Six Nations has been fun and I apologise for those who look forward each year to my minute analysis and, in particular, to the bestowing of the Ronan O'Gara Memorial Gobshite Award. This particular decoration has become harder to award as the game more and more allows all and sundry to question the referee and demand rugby's equivalent of trial by television replay. Such is professionalism. The other symptom is the Bomb Squad problem - the ugly feature by which the bench is emptied of replacements and an all-but-complete new pack takes to the field. Anyone know how to put genies back in bottles? No matter, there has been plenty to admire: France's hubristic self-immolation against a gallant but out-gunned England; France's brilliant destruction of Italy; France's even better pricking of the bubble of Irish entitlement. As I say, all good stuff. As for the weekend just passed - Scotland at last showed up but only for two-thirds of a match; Wales only condescended to play once they were safely condemned to lose; I seem to be alone in the view that England were turgid against Italy. In Cheltenham week (not going - I'm afraid I'm getting old) my fun bet is not to do with the horses but a speculative wager on Wales to beat England in Cardiff. The Welsh are rather touchingly obsessed with beating the English and this England team are fragile.

Enough of rugby (not something you would have heard me say in my wild youth) and back to the subject of Cheltenham. Tomorrow's card looks set to feature four odds -on favourites. Where is the fun in that? The dominance of the Irish (or more particularly of the brilliant Willy Mullins) is also a problem. I have no answer to these factors, nor to the increasing numbers of skinny-suited young men who do their betting on their phones even though they are but a step away from the most exciting betting ring in the sport. I'm just saying it's a pity.

Let me tell you of a good weekend, or rather a long weekend. My trip to Ynys Mon last week could only have been bettered if the Groupie had been with me. Work could not spare her. What her absence did mean is that having checked out the bricks and mortar of Plas Piggy (all sound), I was free to have a ridiculously self-indulgent few days. I watched five games of rugby (Six Nations and U20 Six Nations), I played golf on a gloriously sunny and calm afternoon on the deserted links at The Anglesey, and on Saturday evening I watched The Magnificent Ambersons. I reviewed this long ago (25 August 2010 when this blog was in its infancy) but was not at that time in the habit of giving a rating to pictures. I refer you to that early brief review but now add a rating of 90/100. That good. Even better when accompanied by a bottle of Barolo. I made myself a rather good cheese omelette for my tea. And to cap off the trip I had an unobstructed return journey and broke my PB for the route. There may be three steps to heaven but who knew that one of them takes only two hours and thirty-two minutes.   

 

Yesterday I Have Mostly Been:

Visiting Bodnant Garden. This is a wondrous place and as good a reason as you might find to justify the National Trust policy of taking over a great garden even if the adjoining great house does not come with it. I believe this policy may have been instituted with Bodnant as its first example. The Groupie and I walked extensively and enjoyed a picnic lunch at the Far End of the garden. 

Eating - anchovies on toast. A particular favourite.

Drinking - Chianti.

Feeling - good about life.   

I Went To Manchester And It Didn't Rain

All of which was a pity since after my return to good old Brum, the rain has hardly left Manchester alone. I was there for the cricket and it looks as if the destiny of the Ashes will be settled by the intervention of the weather. England have utterly outplayed the Australians in this match but you have to have a poor medium-term memory to be oblivious of previous occasions where England have got away with it. So no complaints from this quarter - those should be reserved for the gratuitous gifting of the first test to the Aussies - see earlier grumpy entry.

All is forgiven

Our day at Old Trafford was a real treat. We saw Jonny Bairstow at his pugnacious best and we saw the Aussies reduced to pleasing dishevilment. Gratifying. Sadly one has to comment on the truly shocking toilet provision within the ground. Half hour queues to avail oneself of a squalid sewer is not acceptable. I feel a strongly-worded letter coming on.

So what else? Not much to be honest. I was having what I hope will be my last examined encounter with Shakespeare and Bagehot last week and found myself mentally drained as a result. Then a day on the quasi-lash at Old Trafford left this poor little poppet physically empty as well. Time for the Pig to act his age not his shoe size.

A thought - Italian red wines. Yes please.   

From The Desk Of The Author

bloody lovely

I have spent the last couple of days here on the island (that's Mon to you and me) in confinement with Shakespeare and Bagehot, pushing through the rather tedious task of correcting the manuscript of my thesis. I never thought I would say this but I can actually tire of exposure to my own purple prose. Who would have thunk it eh? Still, my efforts have been productive and as the afternoon slips into its seventh hour I have given myself permission to open a recently purchased bottle of Basciano Il Corto 2019. I do get some things right - it's bloody lovely.

So what (apart from the academic distractions which quite properly don't interest you) has been going on with the Pig? Well, he's strained his left calf muscle (in a new area - of the leg, not of the country) which is a pity because he's been feeling quite fit. He's played quite a bit of golf and after some encouraging signs has gone significantly backwards in the last couple of weeks, so we won't dwell on that.

Politics, bloody politics. What a shitfest. No I'm not going to depress myself by dwelling on the subject. Just for now. Oh I know what I can tell you about. You may remember that I was lamenting the deplorable adaptation of Great Expectations offered up by the BBC. Well the good news is this - the same organisation's 2011 offering of the same source material is on iPlayer and it's so much better that the it makes you suspect that someone at the Beeb left it up there because they were so ashamed of the newer pile of shite. It's teatime - spicy mussels are calling and that wine won't drink itsef. TTFN.

At This Rate I'm Going To Have To Run Bloody Miles

I feel better about myself and the world when I am running regularly. Thanks to the wonders of my chiropractor and my expensive insoles, I am free of injury most of the time these days, barring, of course, the aches and pains that come from a combination of encroaching old age and decades of reckless endeavour on the rugby field. 

So, anyway, I am here in Anglesey to get some work done and I prefaced that work with a run this morning. And what did I think about while running - not Walter Bagehot (the work I referred to) and not the divine views of the coast. No, it was that bastard Donald Trump. He was arrested yesterday on what, I'm afraid (and you will remember that I am a lawyer), seem to me to be flimsy chrages. The charges come down to his having misdescribed the money he paid to the porn star he undoubtedly shagged as 'legal expenses'. He was at his egregious self-justifying best when he returned to his lair in Florida and lamented this 'witch hunt'. I hate to say this (because the man is the  biggest stain on mainstream politics in the Western world - and these things matter) but the Democrats may have ushered themselves closer to another own-goal. Trump is a shit of the first water. But Joe Biden is as ineffectual an opponent as one might care to imagine. And if they really want to nail Trump they need something better than this. 

Good news - after a slow start, I got some of that work done and tonight I think I'll watch a film. No wine though - it's a weekday and I'm being a good boy. This midweek abstinence does my body some good but not my wallet, since I am weighed down by my increasing dependence on good Barolo and Rioja for vinous pleasure. You can't take it with you. 

Another Day, Another Film

This blog is in danger of being taken over by my estimations of various films. Sorry about that but I do watch a fair number of movies and I find the political world so tawdry that it is difficult to comment upon it. Difficult, that is, in the pain it affords me to begin thinking about it. But there is, even in my limited world, rather more than films and politics. That is true - I realise this as I type it. So never mind that latest film (of which more anon) here is a scattergun smorgasbord of what is going on in the Pig's mind.

The Conservative Party has been in power too long and its parliamentary party is stuffed full of mediocrities who never seriously thought they were going to win a seat. I once had dealings with a relatively wise man who made the arresting defence of our first-past-the-post electoral system that it produced an inevitable swings and roundabouts effect and that the variety between successive governments acted to our benefit, certainly was more desirable than some sort of proportional representation induced perma-coalition. As I think of it now, the problem has been that we had a highly conservative (note the lower case c) Prime Minister in Blair and, after a brief interlude for the temperamentally unsuited Brown, we then got another smooth indifferentist in the lazy Cameron who might as well, as it turned out, have been wearing a Blair mask. Just to spice things up the Labour Party then followed the comically useless Ed Miliband with the barking mad and unelectable Jeremy Corbyn. All of which condemned us to a succession of useless Tories, prime amongst them the clever but venal Boris. We now have Rishi Sunak who, one has to admit, does give the impression of being a clever chap but who leads the aforesaid bunch of mediocrities. And then I look at bloody Keir Starmer and I despair. We should remember just how loyally Starmer served Corbyn. I've never done it before but I am tempted to spoil my ballot next time around. Or maybe I should transfer my voting domicile to Ynys Mon (where I pen this) so that at least I can be part of a meaningful contest between Plaid and Conservatives.

So that's politics out of the way. You will gather that I might best be described as pissed-off. And I haven't even touched on world politics. Another day. No, let's move on to drink, wine to be exact. We are pleased to announce that the winner of the OG wine variety of the year is, not for the first time, Barolo. This stuff is just bloody fantastic as we oenophiles put it. As with much else (and ironic for a man who has always described himself as having the palate of a stray dog) the Pig has saddled himself with expensive taste. Oh well you can't take it with you - how's that for a tax planning strategy.

I returned to my beloved rugby union in my last post so I won't dwell. Suffice to say that there is a learned treatise to be written (I might be just the man) on the Welsh Rugby Union (and for that matter the English as well) and restraint of trade. I can feel my inner Mr Angry welling up again.

Golf. What solace this game is to me notwithstanding my fluctuation from adequacy to incompetence. This fluctuation is not from day to day but from minute to minute. No matter, I have got myself a game at Royal St. David's on Friday with my mate Big Willy. I've loaded a box of new balls into the bag in anticipation.

So at last we come to that film. Effie Gray (2015, available on iPlayer) is a curate's egg of a film. Emma Thompson's screenplay is predictably learned and acute but seems to cut off just as the story threatens a crescendo. What we do have is a neat consideration of the doomed marriage between Gray and John Ruskin. Just as she frees herself of the wretched man and his awful parents, the movie closes without so much as a signal of the later and deserved connubial bliss that the real Effie found with John Everett Millais. Perhaps Thompson had her sights on an unlikely sequel. 63/100. 

Do you know what are nice? I'll tell you: Tunnock's Caramel Wafer Biscuits, thats' what. I'm going to have one now. I went for a run this morning so I've earned it. Goodbye.

 

Twelve Films At Christmas - 3 - Teamed With Kultcha Vultcha - Part The Third

White Christmas may not be (as any film bore/geek like OG will tell you) the film in which the title song makes its first appearance (that would be Holiday Inn) but it has undoubtedly become part of the Christmas furniture. Danny Kaye may only have been third choice to star alongside Bing Crosby but the producers got lucky - his sort of clowning is a nice counterpoint to Crosby's elegant langour.

And of course any film is best when seen in a packed cinema. So to the Electric Cinema for a screening of the movie, but not your usual two hours of pleasurable detachment. No, this was a screening paired with wine tasting, in the hands of the estimable Wine Events Company. The film was cheerfully paused to take in an Alsace cremant, an Austrian Riesling,  two reds , and a port, plus, naturally, a couple of mince pies. Brilliant. As for the film, difficult to be objective but 70/100.

A Stately Pleasure Dome

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree

Coleridge lived too early ever to have seen the stately pleasure dome decreed by the remarkable Lord Armstrong at Cragside but the poet's lambent words went searing through the Pig's pretentious mind as he walked from the car park to Cragside this morning. Don't get me wrong, the Pig loves this sort of stuff, that is to say both Coleridge's poetry and Armstrong's grandiosity.

The house itself is a higgledy-piggledy affair, remodelled and extended on several occasions by Armstrong as he rose from a law office to mechanical genius - yet another case (take my mate Walter Bagehot for example) of someone qualifying as a lawyer and deciding there was a better life elsewhere. If only, if only, muses the Pig.

The whole Cragside Estate is testament to man working on his environment - lakes were created, hydro-electric power harnessed, millions of trees planted. It is fabulous. The Groupie made a very good point as we soldiered about in the rain - precisely what would the modern media make of a billionaire who had the audacity to try something as adventurous as Cragside today.

The Coleridge lines get an outing in Citizen Kane of course. I don't know enough to say whether Armstrong died bereft like Kane, but he certainly died childless and a century plus later his creation is in the hands of the National Trust who do a grand job. Death and taxes - life's two great certainties.

Cragside - a brilliant and thought-provoking day out. No dining out today. We're having shop-bought pizzas and I've opened an insolent (vinous argot for cheap) rioja. Good times.  

More Rain, More Seaside

I'm back home at Casa Piggy after a pleasant enough drive back on the A55 - A525 route. I had been planning to take the classic A5 route but I found myself listening to an interesting documentary about Elvis Presley's 1968 comeback television special and didn't want to lose the radio signal. It was a good piece of cultural materialism, whatever that really means.  

I digress. Just a brief line to comment on England's Six Nations performance on Sunday. The good thing: Italy were kept scoreless; the bad thing: most everything else - imprecision masquerading as ambition. They should expect to be judged by high standards. On that basis this was, in academic terms, a solid 2:2, nothing more.

I had another bottle of that Malbec and stayed awake for the whole of the Super Bowl - a tight tussle that rewarded my patience. I could do without all the half-time shenanigans mind you. I made myself a hot-dog at that stage and took in some of the Winter Olympics. Also boring.

I've discovered a new food group that I like - the Ginsters Bombay Potato and Spinach Pasty. Vivid proof that vegetarianism isn't always good for you. I have been trying (mostly successfully) to avoid eating meat during the week (I don't drink alcohol either) because of my blood pressure. Not at all convinced that it does me any good but I do feel vaguely virtuous.

Sorry, I've just looked at the title I had given this piece - it was raining at the seaside.

Brave New World That Has Such People In It. Or Quite Possibly Not.

Casa Piggy is located in what could justifiably be described as a leafy suburb. One would have to confess that this locale is a safe haven for the urban affluent. It sits in a constituency with an unchallengeable Tory majority. But we do now have a Lidl and we are soon to have an Aldi - both much to the disgust of some reactionary residents, who are still mourning the closure of our Waitrose. Well, you won't find Big Fat Pig complaining. No Siree Bob. This is because the Pig yesterday found that Lidl stock a perfectly acceptable Barolo at £11.99 a bottle. Brave new world indeed.

But away from these (the Pig has to concede) trifling triumphs of the middle classes, things do not look so good. I read a good and pertinent line a couple of weeks ago to the effect that Boris Johnson doesn't care what direction the bus is going, just as long as he is driving. Tragically this is true. We are led by political pygmies and those pygmies are opposed by even shorter nonentities. To push that bus analogy to its limits - none of them can see over the bloody steering wheel. Still, at least I am not going to run out of Barolo this side of Christmas.

Regular readers (a small but loyal band) will be agog to know the subject of this year's OG Advent Calendar. You'll have to wait just a little longer. I'm afraid it's a bit parochial this year but it's given me some fun.

Round The Coast Towards Moelfre

I have been suffering with writer's block. That is putting it rather grandly - what I mean to say is that, rather to my surprise, my chapter on Antony and Cleopatra has got me stumped. I love the play but finding anything cogent to say about it is proving a horrible challenge. It is having too many ideas rather than none, which is, I suppose a good thing. Oh well, sod it, the sun's out and the red wine is chilled. Yes, I did say chilled red wine. If it's good enough for the Spanish, it's good enough for me.

It's renovation time here at Plas Piggy. I spent the morning ripping up the flooring I laid twenty plus years ago in the front bedroom. My handiwork will be replaced by a more professional product. Sad to see the last vestiges of my DIY efforts being consigned to the scrapheap but I have to admit that those few remaining features of my work are looking tired. 

After loading the old flooring into Canyonero (if you're not a devotee of The Simpsons and don't get this reference, I'm afraid I haven't got time to explain) I treated myself to a walk around the coast path towards Moelfre. The sun is out with only a slight breeze and the beach is crowded with happy noise. Life's been good to me so far.

I have been listening to the test match but have now given up on England. Is there a worse top three currently playing in international cricket? I know there probably must be but surely we can find better than this. Technique seems to be an optional extra these days. Pop will eat itself - see earler blogs for an explanation.  

Tonight I will mostly be eating meat pie.

Wild Celebrations - Not

The Pig's sixty-first birthday slipped quietly by. He had lunch with his mother (who had brought with her his favourite quiche) and in the evening enjoyed (very much so) a meal of barbecue pork ribs, washed down with the last of the 2001 Barolo. Altogether a very passable sort of a day.

I wrote in glowing terms about Aaron Sorkin last week, and took another side-swipe at David Hare in doing so. Well, as it happens the Groupie and I took in an old Hare movie last night and I haven't changed my mind. I don't deny that Hare has oodles of talent but his politics can't help but intrude themselves and his characters (and this is where Sorkin wins hands down) speak in clumsy and portentous exposition. Having said that, Page Eight is a solid and reassuringly old-fashioned spy film. Not all the online reviews agreed but I thought Bill Nighy was rather good. 66/100.

What are we to make of politics? Quelle shower de shit, as the French don't say. I've been patient with Bors Johnson but his arrant mendacity on the ridiculous business of the renovation of the Downing Street flat is a bridge too far. Answer the bloody question you massive tool. Mind you, don't start me on bloody Keir Starmer, an unprincipled mediocrity who got his knighthood for banging-up wrong-uns. Smarmy lawyer indeed. 

Are Brilliant ... Mark XXVI

 It's been a while since the last 'Are Brilliant' so I thought I'd better revive it. Besides a change being as good as a rest it has been one of those good to be alive holiday weekends so the revival is timely.

Are brilliant: 

the Groupie. I'm here at the old country residence with her and that always makes me feel blessed.

Ynys Mon: we walked yesterday on the Menai Straits (well not actually on them but you know what I mean) and I marvelled at the perfect fusion of man and nature that is the sea and the two Menai bridges.

The Anglesey Coast Path - one hundred and twenty-five miles of grandeur.

Gregory's Girl, watched yesterday night and which is every bit as charming and downright funny as I had remembered.Out of the top draw. 88/100.

Sausages. Good sausages.

Malbec.

Welsh Chilli Chutney, a jar of which one of our visitors left in the fridge. Spicy, nice with cheddar.

A Not Unsatisfactory Day

Did you like the double negative? It's something David Gower favours in his cricket commentaries and although it can seem a trifle affected I think it's not unacceptable to mimic one's heroes.

The day to which I refer is the immediate past Saturday. I was on the first tee at Pype Hayes at 7.14 to play with BH and my little brother WJR. The weather forecast for the day had been pretty dire but along the lines of the sun shining on the righteous (I accept on reflection that any reference to BH, WJR and the Pig as righteous might be stretching it) it proved perfect golfing weather - not too hot and a gentle breeze to keep it interesting. As it happened I played a tad worse than earlier in the week but not so badly as to prompt despondency. The company was matchless and we got round in a little over three hours without ever having to wait over a shot and without causing anyone behind us to wait - would that it were always so.

After a socially distanced chat with the lads I was back home by half eleven and after a brief interval and a cup of not unimpressive coffee (Kenyan) I was out mowing the lawn with the not unprecious mower. Now here I have to confess an error - I don't know what flitted across my consciousness but I lost my sense of direction and cut an errant stripe. It doesn't look too bad but I, of course, can see it. Oh well it is nice to have goals, so next time I will get it right. The search for lawn perfection keeps me young.

Golf done, lawn mowed, I was soon able to treat myself to a not inelegant glass of 2016 Primitivo. Wine really does taste better if you make yourself wait until the weekend. If, dear reader, you have shares in Majestic Wine you might want to sell them now that the Pig is spending rather less there than had become habitual.

A day such as Saturday deserves to be rounded off by a good film. Well, Pig and the Groupie did not in all truth watch a good film but we did watch the not unentertaining Angel has Fallen. If you have seen either of the previous two entries from this stable, Olympus has Fallen, and London has Fallen, you will not be surprised to learn that the baddies make an attempt on the President's life and it falls to Gerard Butler single-handedly to bring them to account. Silly, violent, profane but not borne down by a sense of its own importance, I like films like this when I'm in the mood. Saturday was such a day. Oh and it has a slight but amusing final scene. 52/100.

So all in all and as I say, not unsatisfactory. 

The Seventh Age Of Man - Day 1

The Boy Shakespeare knew a thing or two.

                                  Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

And so the Pig has embarked on his seventh decade. It is only a number but I must confess that this one has given me more pause for thought than any previous landmark. I am tempted to feel old. Is that a bad thing? Rage, rage against the dying of the light, as another poet of note put it.

If only more clients had cause to be that grateful

Sans teeth? Quite good on that score - despite close on forty years of rugby I have lost only one tooth. Sans eyes - well I am wearing my cheap reading glasses to write this but otherwise my laser-enhanced eyesight still does me proud. Sans taste - aye there's the rub. Nothing particularly wrong on that score, apart from the uneducated palate that has accompanied me all my life. I still fight against this handicap and as if to prove that there is life in the old dog yet, my last two nights' drinking ought to satisfy any oenophile who has strayed onto this site. On Sunday I blew the dust off a present from a grateful client from my former life, indeed a client at the heart of the best work I ever did. Dom Perignon Cuvee 1992. Yum yum; a delicate mousse, and a nutty smoothness.

Then last night for my birthday tea I had steak, chips and onion rings - my request. My other culinary favourite had arrived at lunchtime - my Mum's quiche delivered to the doorstep. Spoilt brat. Anyway, to accompany my steak (beautifully cooked by the Groupie) I opened the penultimate bottle of the La Serra Barolo 2001 from the cellar (alright, I admit it's a cupboard). The Groupie had got me four bottles of this divine stuff for my fiftieth birthday, having first encountered it at the Fat Duck. Yum, yum, yum. The odds are against the final bottle lasting to my seventieth. 

So after this a day of lethargy, I have resolved not to mope. I have been blessed to enjoy six previous ten year childhoods (the Bard got that bit wrong) so I am going to make the most of this one. Sans everything? Not bloody likely mate. Not yet.    

Writers Read

The urge to read has remained with me as we go deeper into the coronavirus lockdown. In the last week I went straight from Simon Raven's Friends in Low Places to its successor in the Alms for Oblivion sequence, The Sabre Squadron. To my mind this is the best of the ten novels. It can profitably be read without reference to the other books, but once you have read it I suspect you will want to search out the remainder.

After the scabrous Raven, a change of tack altogether. I fancied a chunk of comfort reading so it was back to a childhood favourite author, Arthur Ransome. I lazily thought I had read all the Swallows and Amazons tracts but I had overlooked Missee Lee. A book which would today have child protectors rushing to condemn it and which might very well also be deemed racist, it rockets along at breakneck pace and is a plain and simple delight.

Politics still intrudes. In America the Democrats have at least stopped fighting each other and will hopefully direct all their energy to defeating the narcissistic sociopath that is Donal Trump. Mind you whether the selection of someone as obviously second-rate as Joe Biden to lead the fight is a good one must be very open to question. Good luck to them in any event. In 1980s America I met Republicans who were very thoroughly decent people but one has to say that the amoral manner in which today's GOP has fallen in behind Trump should leave members thoroughly ashamed.

At home I'm afraid I have to say that I have always found something vaguely unpleasant in the phenomenon of Keir Starmer. Yet another bloody lawyer, he was a good enough prosecutor to attract a knighthood under a Tory regime. Despite his carefully cultivated appearance of moderation he had no problem falling in behind the laughable policies of Corbyn. He started his leadership of the Labour Party by disavowing factional opposition for the sake of opposition and the very next day published a mealy-mouthed attack on the conduct of the coronavirus crisis. When Boris Johnson fell seriously ill Starmer blathered self-serving bollocks about constitutional procedures. Sanctimonious prig.

But hey ho, the sun is shining, the Pig ran five miles this morning and there is one glass of Chateauneuf-du-Pape left from last night's bottle (it was a bank holiday so therefore does not count as a weekday) - the recliner in the garden is calling and the Pig is going to read another chapter of John Wilders' The Lost Garden, a consideration of Shakespeare's history plays (including those of Rome) in a lapsarian context. You must be so jealous.

What Have I Done To Deserve This?

I think I've posed this question before but sod it, this is my blog and I'll cry if I want to. And look at me daringly ending a sentence with a preposition - oh no it's not - of course it's an infinite marker in this usage.

So what's winding up the Big Fat Pig today? Well here I am, finding myself a citizen-subject of a country in which within the space of a couple of days arch-berk Jeremy Corbyn, arch-joke Harriet Harman, and arch-windbag Ken Clarke have all expressed their willingness 'to serve' as caretaker Prime Minister as Boris steers us knowingly over what most people think is a cliff but others believe is the tiniest of tiny steps. It tells you how little I think of this trio of selfless volunteers that I believe all are less well-suited to the premiership than the amoral Boris. Don't start me on Philip Hammond and Nancy Pelosi - two exemplars of a self-regarding righteousness that might almost put La Harman to shame. Let's just say this Phil: don't presume to tell me why I voted as I did you patronising twat. Let's just say this Nancy: I saw the IRA collection tins in Boston bars in the eighties that helped fund the bombing of innocents in cities like my own beloved Birmingham and it made me sick. And before you write in, yes I am a catholic.

But there are reasons to be cheerful. DN2 is in transit back to Brum for the weekend and she will be joined by DN1 tomorrow. We can all share the celebration of The Groupie's latest commercial triumph - she came back from That London yesterday having endured a sale process that has dragged on for three quarters of a year. Saying I am proud does it all less than justice.

While the Groupie was in the Big Smoke I watched, with no great expectations, Solo - a Star Wars Story. Here's the thing, it's good fun. It's really a western set in outer space and it overstays its welcome by perhaps twenty minutes but, as I said, it's good fun, certainly better than the first three volumes of the core Star Wars. 7/10. So, reasons to be cheerful. Oh and I forgot to say that I stocked up on wine yesterday and a sophisticated Chianti will be calling me a little later.

This Morning I Shot An Elephant In My Pyjamas ...

I don't know what he was doing in my pyjamas. It could only be Groucho Marx, in this instance as a supposedly intrepid explorer in Animal Crackers. Great fun which I rewatched with my dear old Dad yesterday morning. Not perfect of course (the film not me you fool) and I suppose incorrect on the modern scale, but the greatest fun. At this distance in time (it is eighty-nine years old) it probably comes down to whether or not you like the Marx Brothers, or indeed whether you have even heard of them. Their very presence predisposes me to mirth so 8/10.

A very different kettle of fish, The Godfather Part III, was today's fare as I took a break from reading up on Darwin and Huxley. I could explain why I am reading about these distinguished Victorians but I have to concede that my reasons are pretty obscure and you know I like you to be entertained, so we'll wait for a day when I feel disposed to dress it all up. So Godfather Part III - any good? Taken on its own, yes it is, but in the context of its two predecessors (both of which are right up there with the very best of all time) it disappoints. The narrative drive gets lost around the middle and the climax is then cinematically botched. Sofia Coppola is, I'm afraid, woefully miscast as Mary Corleone. Coppola has of course since redeemed herself several times over as a director. 7/10 but definitely one for completists to acknowledge and enjoy.

Now then, a little quiz for those of you who have read me before - on which three mechanical devices does the Overgraduate bestow the sobriquet 'Precious'? That's right there is the Precious Jag (now into its third decade and beautiful to behold as ever), then there is the Precious Bike (neglected of late but  I'll soon put that right if the sun persists), and finally there is the Precious Mower - petrol of course and self-propelled. Well the original Mower is dead, long live the new Mower. Quieter than its predecessor and on the initial evidence a better cutter, let me introduce you to the Honda Izy HRG466. May it give me service even half as good as the old one which came with us to this house and had a near twenty year career.

And one final announcement - today's blog is brought to you with the more than acceptable assistance of Paul Jaboulet Aine Syrah 2017. As we experts say, yum yum.

Gangs Of New York

For Gangs of New York I opened a bottle of Majestica Rioja. Fine wine, fine film.

Not in the same league as the same director's magisterial Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York is nonetheless quite some achievement, ripping apart the rose-tinted mythology of America's history and reassembling it as a morass of sectarian violence out of which, as if by miracle, democracy will grow. It has Daniel Day Lewis in typically supreme form and Leonardo DiCaprio matching him every step of the way in the acting stakes. Three hours near enough - time well spent. 8/10.

The Big Lebowski

I love the Coen brothers. The Groupie is less sure, so in her absence last night I watched The Big Lebowski. Very, very good, almost brilliant in fact. Jeff Bridges - brilliant. John Goodman - brilliant. The plot wanders hither and thither but it is the atmosphere of the thing that counts. Managing to be both whimsical and profane it is the work of masters of the craft. The Dude abides - watch it and you'll see that this statement matters. 8.5/10. I accompanied it with a Chilean cabernet sauvignon. Also 8.5/10. The grape abides, you might say.