Shows, Shows, Shows

That's a bit of an exaggeration; it's actually shows, shows (*). First up was the 214th Otley Show. I know that regular readers will be expecting action photos of the Young Farmers Ladies Tug-of-War competition - which was as engrossing as ever - or at least of some sheep, but you'll have to make do with this instead:

One of my regular boardgaming group is the Otley Lemon Curd King for a year. We are an eclectically talented bunch.

And then on Sunday it was off to Partizan. Regular readers will not be expecting anything much in the way of a photographic record, and indeed there is none. Fortunately other, more diligent, bloggists have already started to post image-rich accounts of the day for your viewing pleasure. Suffice it to say that there were lots of games (too many? I've certainly seen photos of at least one game that I simply don't remember.) and they all looked very nice. In a slightly annoying development a couple of them had added scenic endpieces to the tables, which no doubt made it look prettier if one was sat at the table playing, but rather got in the way of the enjoyment of the paying punters. I hope this doesn't become the fashion.

I didn't buy much. I picked up a copy of the Northampton Battlefield Society's wargamers guide to Edgecote and had a short chat with co-author Graham 'Trebian' Evans. Anyone familiar with his blog won't be surprised that he managed to turn the conversation to Towton, very much a bee in his bonnet. I bought a laser line thing at the Warbases stand. I had one which I bought very cheaply when Woolworth's went bust, but it went the same way as its vendor some time ago. I managed to have a word with Early War Miniatures and establish how to order stuff given the current state of their website. I felt a bit bad about raising the subject of their IT problems because it clearly touched a raw nerve and elicited a very pained look. Will I now progress the Mexican Revolution project? Maybe.

I also caught up with my old schoolfriend and wargaming opponent Don. He had news of another old friend (and bandmate, about which the less said the better) who, judging by the pictures Don had, has signed some sort of pact with devil because he looks exactly the same as he did when we were young men. Bastard.

* Note the semicolon, which will not disappear here while I'm in charge.

Fuentes de Oñoro

 I previously wrote that I was having a month's break from wargaming. I don't seem to have added that I signed off by taking the role of General Ney in the first night of a refight of Fuentes de Oñoro. 

I obviously expected it to be all wrapped up by the time I returned to the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach, but there seemed to have been some slacking in my absence because the situation hadn't moved on much at all. In particular some stubborn British infantry in square, who had held up the French swinging left flank advance were, weeks later, still doing the same thing. However, I broke the square with my heavy cavalry and rode them down. This was historically a rare event, and to do so in Piquet, or at least the bastardised version which we play, requires a rather unlikely sequence of cards to be turned. I got so excited at it all falling into place that sadly I forgot to take a photo of the event. After that it was fairly inevitable that the British would eventually run out of morale, which they duly did.

I also got in the first game in months in my annexe, with a re-run of the C&C game of Dennewitz last played with my plumber. This time it was against one of regular boardgaming opponents, who acquitted himself well in this different form of gaming as long as you ignore all the suicidal cavalry charges he made. 

And to continue this startling run of hobby activity I'm off to Partizan on Sunday, provided of course that I survive the excitement of tomorrow's 214th Otley Show.

Filling Time

 I haven't forgotten my promise to document at tedious length my adventures in London, plus there's the 211th Otley Show to report on (*). However, I have been in the dentist's chair again and am feeling a bit bashed about.

While I'm here though, an update on BT. You may remember they gave me a couple of small, seemingly arbitrary amounts of compensation for a bit of a delay in upgrading my broadband. Well, they've now given me a third payment, and this time it's £619.92, thus moving from the slightly odd to the frankly ridiculous. That amount is more than I will pay during the whole of the duration of the contract whose implementation caused the problem in the first place. Sell your BT shares immediately, they have lost the plot.

* Spoiler alert: it was pretty much the same as the other 210. Still, it was good to be there again after the pandemic gap.

Sign of the Times

 Seen in the window of the charity bookshop in Otley:

Franklin my dear

 It's very difficult to find a subject to blog about when there is so little happening in the world. However UK readers may possibly have seen on the television news that the town is under water again.

The photo that the BBC have been using appears to have been taken from upstairs in one of those houses behind the bridge. On many a summer's day I've thought they look like a lovely place to live; less so on a winter's day when the Wharfe has burst its banks and there is several feet of dirty, cold water in your kitchen. This latest storm was sponsored by that mint which offers overpriced collectibles to the gullible; a strange marketing strategy if you ask me, associating your name with all that destruction. Still, they did once sue the late Princess Diana's charity so they are obviously of the view that all publicity is good publicity. Actually, speaking of crap marketing I have just received an email from a clothing company headlined "Hello Graham, are the storms done yet?", to which the obvious response is "No, look out of the bloody window". They sign off with "Stay cool"; that won't be hard.

The real part of every non-trivial zero of the Reimann zeta function is 1/2

 Or is it?

Otley, the town in which I live, has almost as many churches as it does pubs; and it has a lot of pubs. Because of this - the church bit not the pub bit - I and my fellow citizens regularly get pieces of paper put through our letterboxes informing us of 'the good news'. Indeed one minor upside of Covid is that the various congregations have stopped knocking on the door to tell me all about it in person. Anyway, today being Christmas Eve, I assumed that the home-printed sheet delivered this afternoon was something along those lines. But no, it was someone living relatively locally announcing to the world that they had proved the Reimann hypothesis, a conjecture which as I'm sure you all know dates from 1859 and is one of the most important unsolved problems in mathematics. Now that is good news.

A chap with a beard

After having a celebration cup of tea and mince pie I started to wonder why the door-to-door delivery had been felt necessary, so I re-read the note. It turns out that the writer was appealing for anyone with a modicum of mathematical knowledge to double check her workings prior to her claiming the large prize on offer, which from memory is US $1 million. Sadly, an unimpressive degree in Mathematical Sciences nearly half a century ago is far from sufficient for me to feel qualified to volunteer. Still, it is the season of goodwill to all men, so I wish her joy in her search, even if her chosen method of making it seems a tad unorthodox. If any reader feels better qualified than me to help, then let me know and I'll put you in touch. In any event, when this auspicious event makes the headlines, remember that you read it here first.

It just remains for me to wish you all Gut Yontiff and a happy, peaceful and, above all, healthy time over Christmas.

Pot91pouri

I forgot to mention when posting about 'The Turn of the Screw' that the evening I attended was broadcast live on OperaVision, which was the first time I'd been at any sort of performance being live streamed. Now clearly I know that what makes this all possible are the significant advances in camera technology including the ability to film in low light levels, miniaturisation and remote control, but nevertheless when I first arrived I found myself looking around for something like this:

I used to share a flat with a chap who worked for the BBC and he had lots of stories about David Coleman; and Valerie Singleton; and Basil Brush: all the greats in fact.

In other news, there has been a bit of a delay in making my castle/town wall. I decided that I had made sufficient bits to make it worth spray painting some to see how it turned out. Since that point we have been subject to Storms Ciara and Dennis, bringing strong winds and heavy rain and so rendering spraying - which obviously has to take place outside - impossible.This weekend there was thankfully no storm, despite which there were mysteriously winds just as strong and rain just as heavy. Indeed for the third time in as many weeks there was this:

And this:

Instead of spraying or laser cutting castle walls, I passed the time making myself a Piquet clock, for no better reason than I'd always wanted one and you can't get them anywhere. Piquet being a rather niche game it wouldn't be economic for anyone like Warbases to make them. I am rather pleased with the way it turned out.

It involved me shocking everyone else in the workshop by leaving the laser cutter and moving across to a different bench; in this case the one with the pillar drill, a tool I hadn't used for half a century. Still, there are some things you never forget:

"Pack away now please"

New Year, new lurgy

Or possibly the same old lurgy. There is a bug going round and I've had it. Otherwise of course I would have joined the younger Miss Epictetus for the New Year's Day swim in the Wharfe.

As well as precluding that experience, my being a bit under the weather has also meant no wargaming activity. Although, having said that, at the height of the fever I did have a nightmarish hallucination that we were playing Sidi Rezegh again.

Stranger, pause and look

“Because reading books and having them bound represent two enormously different stages of development. First, people gradually get used to reading, over centuries naturally, but they don't take care of their books and toss them around. Having books bound signifies respect for the book; it indicates that people not only love to read, but they view it an important occupation. Nowhere in Russia has that stage been reached. Europe has been binding its books for sometime.” 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My sabre exploits (not rattling but waving?) took place in The Leeds Library, which is a fascinating place. It is older, both as an institution and a building, than the events whose bicentenary we were marking. Amongst its founding members was Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen.

It doesn't however predate the oldest book in its collection, which I had been privileged to handle just a few days earlier. That was printed in 1483, less than thirty years after Gutenberg had invented the process by which it was produced (*). The book in question is in Latin and is religious in nature. I also was able to look at one printed a couple of decades later, and in that case my 'O' Level Latin was sufficient to tell me that whoever wrote it really, really didn't like Martin Luther. So, within a few decades the new technology of printing was being used in support of religious hatred and persecution; who'd have thought it?

The printed pages of both books were original, but they had been rebound several times. I have always found bookbinding a fascinating craft, although I doubt it's usually as exciting as it is portrayed in Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel (which I recommend, but isn't as good as the Alatriste books). By an unexpected coincidence Conny Kreitmeier served an apprenticeship as a bookbinder before taking up music professionally. It has been too long (at least a week) since we had a video of Conny looking winsome, so here we go:

* As an aside, what was arguably the next major development in printing technology - the Wharfedale stop-cylinder press - was invented just round the corner from where I am writing this.

2018

"The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along" - Lorca

So, here we are again. In oh so many ways 2018 was a complete bag of shit; I confidently predict that 2019 will be worse still. However, let's not indulge in what Eliot termed "the conscious impotence of rage at human folly", let's indulge instead in boring everyone with what a culture vulture I am. Just a couple of months ago one woman formerly of my acquaintance described me - over her shoulder as she left - as a "passive/aggressive point scorer"; guilty as charged.

Opera: I saw twenty one this year, which is rather a lot. I'm going to vote 'Madama Butterfly' as the best, with 'Tosca' a close second; so that's a one-two for Puccini and dead heroines. Posting here has been so erratic that I think I might have to instigate an award in each category for the best performance that I didn't bother to write about. In this case I'm going for a production of 'Suor Angelica' in which clothes were kept on by nuns. So that's actually a one-two-three for Puccini and dead heroines then.

Theatre: I saw fifty three plays and musicals, increased above previous years by the pop-up Shakespeare theatre in York (returning next year I am pleased to say) and by a plethora of Great War commemoration activity. I think my favourite was 'They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay!' - it was certainly the funniest - with a special mention for both 'Journey's End' and 'Barnbow Canaries' - which were certainly the saddest. Best Shakespeare was 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' in York. Top of the unreported was 'From Berlin to Broadway', a marvellous celebration of the work of Kurt Weill.

Music: I saw thirty six bands live, probably down on the previous year if I could be bothered to check, mostly because the local blues club closed. There were some belters (King King, Walter Trout, Devon Allman, Thorbjorn Risager, etc), but top spot has to go to one that I couldn't be arsed to tell you about at the time: Gretchen Peters. If I never again hear anything as good as her version of Tom Russell's 'Guadalupe' then I shall still die a happy man.

Film: I saw sixteen films at the cinema and I think the best of the new ones amongst those was 'Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri', which as it happens was the first that I saw. Best of all was '12 Angry Men', but perhaps it's not fair to judge the others by that. Best new one that I haven't mentioned previously was 'The Florida Project', although I must confess to also really enjoying the rather more lowbrow and shallow 'Bohemian Rhapsody'. Best previously unmentioned re-release was 'The Big Lebowski', apt both because I am sure that we are just about to enter a world of pain, and because the Dude is a Stoic par excellence.

"The Dude abides"

Books: I don't actually know how many books I have read this year; shame on me, I shall start counting forthwith. The non-fiction book of the year had to be 'H.M.S. Electra', the story of the ship on which my uncle served and was lost during the Second World War; incidentally, for those who have played the first video above, Surabaya was the port from which the ship sailed on its final voyage. Best fiction book was - and I bet no one saw this coming - 'League of Spies', the fourth in Robert Merle's 'Fortunes of France' series.

Lectures: A new category for this year. I am rather controversially going to plump for the one on 'Soviet Central Asian Mosaics', which was surprisingly good although admittedly much of the surprise came from the fact that I thought I was going to a talk on 'Australian Aboriginal Art'. Worst by far was that about policing in Otley in the 1950s, which was like a UKIP party political broadcast delivered in the style of Jackanory.

Event of the Year: There was a late entrant into the field for this when only yesterday I over-toasted my pumpkin seeds (not a euphemism) and set the oven on fire. However, and after due consideration, the jury has decided to disallow it on the basis that I rather like the much nuttier flavour; all I need to do now is to find a way to reproduce it without any danger of burning the house down. As an aside, you may not be surprised to hear that at no point did the smoke alarm indicate that anything was amiss.

But back to the year that was. I am tempted by the return of running water to the Casa Epictetus and the resultant improvement in hygiene; or the camel racing at the Otley Show, which lured even me away from the Young Farmers' Ladies Tug-of-War;

or the younger Miss Epictetus' return from her travels and graphic description of skydiving at dawn into the Namibian desert, complete with outraged complaint that they hadn't allowed her to do it in flip-flops; or the elder Miss Epictetus causing an unfortunate and relatively blameless lady to knock herself out on the door of the ladies toilet of the Fountaine Inn at Linton-on-Craven (although for obvious reasons I didn't actually witness that one it did sound very funny as she told me about it while we hurriedly made our escape towards Burnsall); or even the Reiki session I had with the estimable Coral Laroc in the brief period when we were back on good terms. However, for this year it has to be the conversation with what turned out to be the goddaughter of my old ATC commander, Squadron Leader Bill Boorer, leading to the fascinating revelation of the whole story behind his rescue after being shot down in the North Sea.

And that's your lot. As Eliot also wrote: "Next year's words await another voice"

Fine Pork Pies

Gut Yontiff to you all.

Bear up and steer right onward

"To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable." - John Milton

The reason for my absence is a rather mundane one: I have broken my glasses. The reserve pair are OK for distance, but not so good for close up; using the computer has to be rationed, and this blog is frankly not much of a priority. I may be gone for some time.

Let me leave you for now with a couple of photos whose quality has definitely not been improved by my not being able to see very well. The Tour de Yorkshire has been through Otley, twice in fact. This is a little bit of the women's race and a lot of the back of the younger Miss Epictetus' head: 

And this is the first of this year's English asparagus to reach the Casa Epictetus, served on buckwheat pancakes with anchovy, garlic and chilli breadcrumbs. For the record I overdid the chilli:

Alors, mes amis, à bientôt.

442-8 dec; 29-1

The latest stage in the solo run through of the Blue Guitar Great War rules was somewhat curtailed by the evening rain in Adelaide, to the extent that once again nothing much happened. Things weren't helped by all the companies in the battalion on the British left being sent off in various directions by blunder rolls. The Germans have continued to target the road with their mortar, but the British haven't had the opportunity to move along it anyway.

In the centre the observer for the Stokes mortars was sent forward, but, after some rapid rule writing and a truly terrible throw of the dice on behalf of the British, was caught by machine gun fire and removed from play. Cue some more hurried creativity to work out how a new one can be put in place. On their right the issue was repeated failing of command rolls despite my patent method (essentially stolen from Crush the Kaiser) to reduce the chance of this happening.

The have been another couple of rule changes (enhancements?), but I'll just mention that, notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday, I have decided that what the game really needs is separate 'Command' and 'Rally' phases.

The early finish did however give me a chance to check out the Otley Victorian Christmas Fayre. In addition to buying the traditional festive samosa, seasonal food of choice of the nineteenth century working man, I was rather taken by Hardcastle's Amazing Human Vegetable Machine, which I don't recall seeing before.

The odd uneven time

That was how Sylvia Plath described August, and this year at least she was proved right. It's probably easiest to sum it up by saying that my blogging muse disappeared for a while.

There was some wargaming however: mid-eighteenth century in the legendary wargames room using Black Powder. I continue to enjoy the rules, although the effect of broken battalia seems a bit odd to me. I will no doubt return to this in due course; I bet you can't wait. I have also been trying to work out how I feel about 'Through the Mud and the Blood' now we have had a few games and, finding that I wasn't coming to any conclusion, have decided to put the period on the back burner and do something different next time we are in the annexe.

Your bloggist walks it off

Cultural life always takes a dip at this time of year, but there have been events in places as diverse as Keighley (Ayckbourn) and Salzburg (Mozart funnily enough). Conversely there has been a fair bit of walking and visits have been made to Bracken Ghyll, the Seven Arches and various other places. And I can't leave without alluding to the very funny goings on at the relaunch of river boats on the Wharfe in Otley, although the same political considerations which stopped the local paper printing the photos also preclude me from providing details.

Gudbuy T'June

I know well

That the June rains...

Just fall

- Uejima Onitsura

There has been a fair bit going on in June, a month in which it was first very hot and then very wet, that I have forborne from posting about. For example I went to see the NT production of Salomé, which was visually impressive (notwithstanding the Guardian describing at as looking as if the Last Supper had been held in a branch of Yo Sushi!), but wasn't terribly entertaining. I hung out in pubs watching bands, saw my second production of 'Kiss Me Kate' of the year, went to both Sheffield and Barnsley, took part in the Otley walking festival and still found time for occasional trysts with the big bouncy woman. In honour of one of those items, here's another entry in the occasional series featuring bridges of the Yorkshire Dales; this one is the railway viaduct at Knaresborough as seen from the castle.

However, this is a wargaming blog so let's stick to that. There have been a couple of Italian Wars games using Pike & Shotte and about which James has written. I like the rules, although things do fall apart rather quickly once they start to go wrong. On the painting front I have achieved very little. I have completed another dozen WWI British riflemen, but other than that it has all been repair work. When I pack away a Napoleonic game I always do some labelling (on the underneath of the bases) and some rebasing and repairing. Some of the figures are fifteen years old or so and are showing their age. I find doing a few at a time after they have been used is more bearable than thinking about doing everything at once. And I have finally bitten the bullet and thrown away the gloss varnish that has been repeatedly causing problems; just a shame I didn't do it before I used it on the three units of Prussian Hussars. As for next month, I mentioned that I might set up a Great War game and therefore wargamer's logic has determined that I have assembled and primed some chariots.

Time gets harder to outrun

And so to the theatre. The main question that people have been asking me recently - besides whether I have any more photos of the Young Farmers Ladies Tug-of-War at the Otley Show - is why it's been so long since I last went to see Romeo and Juliet; it must be a couple of months at least. Well, you can all stop worrying, because I have been to see the production that Watermill Theatre are putting on as part of the York International Shakespeare Festival. The show was preceded by a very interesting talk from Dr Helen Smith, Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at York University, who my subsequent research tells me is, amongst other things, an expert on the link between reading and digestion. I hope and trust that your perusal of this blog will swiftly result in a productive visit to the place of easement.

The programme promised a show that highlighted the youthfulness of the characters, but let's be honest, they all do. Barring Sir Ken Branagh's decision to have a much older Mercutio they all make a fuss about how young the actors are without actually going the whole hog and casting a thirteen year old to play Juliet; probably because they'd get arrested if they did. For the record the cross gender roles on this occasion were Benvolio, Friar Laurence and the Prince. The first two happen so often that I'd be more surprised now if they weren't played by women.

I have seen the play so many times that it's all becoming a bit blurred between what is the original text, what is necessary because of limitations of cast numbers, and what is directors putting their personal stamp on it; Dr Smith in one sense made things worse for me by drawing attention to the fact that there were differences between the various versions published in and shortly after the author's lifetime. I will therefore restrict myself to commenting on two things that I am pretty sure were new to me. The second and third scenes in Act 3 (the Nurse telling Juliet of Tybalt's death and Romeo lamenting to the Friar his banishment from Verona) were played simultaneously, cutting between the two in the way that one could imagine happening in a film, and I thought it worked rather well. Less happily, Mercutio played the whole of Act 2, Scene 4 in a wetsuit and flippers: it was by no means clear why. One possibility is that it has something to do with the song 'Wetsuit' - which the cast may have sung before the action started; I'm not entirely au fait with the Vaccines' oeuvre so I can't positively swear to that - but it just made me think of Kermit the Frog.  Anyway, it looked as ridiculous as you would imagine, especially while he was engaging in his 'saucy merchant' banter with the Nurse.

Despite that, I enjoyed it. The cast were not only young they were energetic, enthusiastic and musical. There is of course a lot more fighting and killing than wooing and loving in the play - for the benefit of the apprentices in the audience according to Dr Smith - and the cast seemed more comfortable with that aspect, throwing themselves about with vigour. However, the reality is that convincing chemistry between the eponymous leads is rather rare; these two were no worse than many I've seen.

The 208th Otley Show

The Otley Show has been on and for the first time in some years I managed to arrive home carrying as many cameras as I started out with. It was a day of two halves: lovely weather in the morning and at one o'clock precisely it chucked it down. So, better than usual. Anyway, having still got my camera I shall include more photos than the occasion really deserves.

There were lots of sheep:

A display of synchronised sheep bothering

And cows:

And horses:

 But an outbreak of the plague meant no chickens:

So they sent their children instead:

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this before, but they have ladies tug of war, which is OK if you like that sort of thing:

Hail to asparagus

The Casa Epictetus once again has both heat and hot water, and not a moment too soon because, despite it being spring, we have once again been hit by a hailstorm of Biblical proportions. I watched it from the comfort of the Boathouse Café in Lister Park, but sadly there was no one stranded out on the lake in the pedal boats. Anyway, as it is spring certain things have returned. This being Otley, one of them is Morris dancing; this bunch are the Buttercross Belles:

On a happier note the first English asparagus of the season has arrived. To celebrate I went with sweet potato and ginger mash, pan fried tomato with onion and basil and, of course, poached eggs:

Pot63pouri

"Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away." - Ben Hecht

I have been pottering along here at the Casa Epictetus doing nothing very much. I am not retired and yet I don't work. I am in what Dorothy L. Sayers referred to as 'that time of life when a man can extract an Epicurean enjoyment even from his own passions - the halcyon period between the self-tormenting exuberance of youth and the fretful carpe diem of approaching senility'.

There has been a low level of wargame related activity. I have established that with a couple more trench sections - junctions specifically - I can play the second scenario from the Stout Hearts book. I have come to two conclusions: that I can't be arsed to build them myself and that the first game was successful enough to warrant the investment of a few quid more, and therefore I shall place an order for said trench sections to be collected at Vapnartak. On the painting front I have completed more casualty markers for To The Strongest and quite a few light infantry and Commander/Hero figures for the Ancient Britons that I don't actually need. I also did a couple of the druids from the Hat Gallic Command pack which inevitably led me to consider whether it was time to revisit the Pony Wars rip off rules and convert them to hexes. I don't currently have enough Hexon hills to put on a game, but I don't think they are going to find their way into this order.

On the music front I've watched quite a few local bands in pubs ranging from the blues of the ever reliable Dr Bob & the Bluesmakers, the excellent soul covers of the Solicitors, the poppy folk originals of the Ale Marys and the zydeco of Bayou Gumbo. The last of those seemed to rather misjudge their audience. The lead singer introduced one song with a joke that made perfect sense if you were familiar with 'À la recherche du temps perdu'. The Frenchness so eagerly embraced by Otley in the days of la Tour de France has obviously dissipated, and the Tuesday night crowd in la Jonction had clearly not got round to reading their copy of Proust's masterpiece quite yet.

Speaking of reading, I have been doing quite a bit. I have just started on Jonathan Sumption's history of the Hundred Year's War. It's a big book (and that's just the first volume) and so it's left at home rather than being taken about with me. That's probably for the best because of course he is one of the members of the Supreme Court hearing the appeal about triggering Article 50, and presumably when the judgement goes against the government even the sight of his name on a book cover will be sufficient  to provoke anger in the streets. When I do venture out I rely on my kindle. Recently I have read Priestley's 'Bright Day' (which, given my love of coincidence, I was pleased to see includes a trip to a thinly disguised Malham) and McBain's 'King's Ransom'. The latter has found a place on the - very short - list that I keep of books where part of the plot turns on a cost accountancy issue. I accept that this is perhaps a niche interest, but it appeals to me. Should you wish to read them, the others in this limited category are 'The Rise of Silas Lapham' by William Dean Howells and 'Angel Pavement' by, coincidentally again, J.B. Priestley. I omit Eli Goldratt's 'The Goal' and Roger Jones' 'The Carpetmakers' for reasons which I'm sure will require no further explanation.

And finally I was sorry to hear of the death of former cabinet minister Jim Prior. As I think I have mentioned before he was the only Tory MP or former MP that I have ever met. I had dinner with him twenty years ago in Abu Dhabi while we were both selling weapons of mass destruction to Johnny Foreigner. He was very, very drunk. We discussed a number of relatively trivial things including the recent giant killing exploits of Brentford (my team) over Norwich (his team) in the 3rd round of the FA Cup, but I can remember that we also touched on one of the big political issues of the day -  the proposed third runway at Heathrow; plus ça change.

And so this is Christmas...

 "I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year." - Charles Dickens

Or, to be more precise, it isn't Christmas yet. It is a well known phenomenon that the onset of the Christmas season gets earlier each year. In Otley it starts with firstly the turning on of the lights which was last week - I didn't go - and then with the annual Victorian Fayre, as the Victorians almost certainly didn't spell it. I mentioned last year that I normally choose that staple of the nineteenth century working class festive fare, the samosa. However, and shockingly, there weren't any this year. I therefore opted for a potato and coriander pattie from the vegan street food stall followed by a Malaysian chicken wrap. We do things in the old fashioned way here in the West Riding. There was also once again no reindeer, but there were owls and donkeys, which had to suffice.

This year the big day was preceded by a Victorian Folk Extravaganza the night before. The performers, though thankfully not the audience, entered into the spirit of the event by dressing up. They mostly went for Thomas Hardy type costumes, appearing to have wandered in from either the set of 'Far From The Madding Crowd' or from a Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance gig according to one's perspective. The always excellent Yan Tan Tether looked like a themed version of the old 'I know my place' sketch that featured John Cleese and the Two Ronnies. Yan was a mob capped indoor servant, Tan was a lady from the gentry and Tether had come as Alfred P. Doolittle. Helen McCreary, who joined the Jon Palmer Acoustic band on 'Meet On The Ledge', was dressed as if she was on her way to cheerleading practice, but she's an American, and maybe things were different over there at the time. But the main honours must go to Jon Palmer himself who gone part Dickens and part Tenniel. He sported a long tailed jacket and a truly magnificent hat. Upon spotting his headgear I reached purposefully into the man bag to fetch out the camera which, as recently advised, now accompanies me everywhere. Unfortunately the battery was flat so I had to pinch the pictures above and below from Twitter.

Musically it was very good, although I could have done with fewer seasonal songs; in fact none at all would have been fine by me. Jon Palmer was as good as ever (the new drummer must be at least fifty years older than the previous one) and I could listen to the unaccompanied singing of Yan Tan Tether for hours, especially as they once again did the Jake Thackray song after which they are not named. New to me was Bella Gaffney, whom I also very much enjoyed. She has a soulful voice for a folk singer, a versatile guitar technique (I was reminded of Catfish Keith himself; there is no finer praise), her between song banter is most entertaining and, according to others who pay more attention to these things than me, is rather easy on the eye.