Ho ho ho !

The Emotional Blackmailer’s Handbook. Chapter 99. Projecting your anxieties and insecurities.

Dog-walking on the Common this morning, I found myself talking aloud to her.

“As a loyal friend, you sometimes seem less than adequate. When, for example, was the last time you ever stopped me from setting the whiskey-soaked bed on fire ? Warned me that bad men with guns were approaching on horseback under cover of darkness ? Or brought help from a distant farm in the nick of time as I sank deeper in to the quicksand ?”

The old dog didn't even shrug, just gave me a look that clearly suggested quiet contempt.

lost and found on clapham common, then handed in at battersea nick

listen !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg4T3imFyqI

wild horses couldn't drag me away

... just as the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month was approaching ...

dull sublunary lovers

i like this clifford harper drawing in today's guardian

http://www.agraphia.co.uk/bin/agraphia.html

there but for fortune go you or i ...

returning from last night's concert and crossing the thames reminded me of a famous verse ...

The Embankment

( The fantasia of a Fallen Gentleman on a Cold, Bitter Night)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

Now see I

That warmth`s the very stuff of poesy.

Oh, God, make small

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

T. E. Hulme (1883 - 1917)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Hulme

the picture is picture from ... http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091001.html

waiting for the girls to play us a bit of corelli in the norfolk room

competition time

a double first question, indicative of the author's distasteful curiosity about the enigmatic gender:

about the lady who wore this dress ... might she have swayed ? or wriggled ?

and a question of taste for the aesthete:

which of these teapots from the same small room in the V&A might she have chosen for brewing the first cup of the day ?

giving fenchurch a drink at sheffield park

in the sidings at sheffield park

a good friend retires tomorrow ...

... so i've borrowed two of robert crumb's immortal images for this "cheapskate's card"