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I've been putting two and two together:
BBC: Swan tests confirm deadly virus
A swan found dead in Scotland has tested positive for the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
BBC: Gene Pitney found dead in hotel
American superstar Gene Pitney has been found dead aged 65 in his bed in a Cardiff hotel…
The cause of death is not yet known but is not suspicious.
This one has cover-up written all over it. Remember, you heard it here first.
Jen and I were sitting at a Sicilian coffee table last week, drinking (as seemed only appropriate at the time) coffee, when we noticed a whole pile of Italians behaving very strangely. Nothing unusual there, you might think, but this lot kept rushing out of their shops to look into the sky. I deduced (correctly) that we were in the middle of an alien invasion a partial solar eclipse.
What to do? Caught during an eclipse without any dark plastic to view the sun through. So I borrowed Jen's sunglasses and looked through them at right-angles to my own sunglasses, hoping that the polarised filters set at 90° would cut out most of the light. It's a trick I used with polarised camera lens filters to take photographs of another partial solar eclipse in 1986, but the sunglasses' filters were clearly of inferior quality, so the trick didn't work.
Like I said, what to do? Then I had a flash of inspiration and whipped off my rather dapper Akubra hat. Carefully angling the hat so that the sun shone through the ventilation holes, I placed a copy of that morning's Guardian newspaper in the hat's shadow. As if by magic, a near-perfect image of the solar eclipse was projected on to the paper. It was, in effect, a slighly lower-fi version of the trick I used in 2004 to document with great accuracy the transit of Venus.
…I must say, I was rather pleased with myself, re-inventing the telescope in the land of Galileo.
Stense became an auntie today. Her niece, Sian Rachel Something (she did tell me the third name, but I forget) was born in the early hours of this morning. Congratulations to Stense's sister (The Doc) and her brother-in-law, Rob.
By a strange co-incidence, today (5th April) is the date that Stense has consistently yet mistakenly believed to be my birthday. She finally got it right this year, even though my presents didn't arrive until this afternoon. There was a definite Seventies ring to them. Stense was evidently getting her own back for all the hippy jibes.
Auntie Stense, eh? That's going to take some getting used to.
I met Carolyn for coffee this lunchtime. She turned up with a belated birthday present for yours truly: a helium-filled balloon. She had brought it to work with her on the train. She made me walk through the streets of Liverpool, trailing it behind me. Carolyn said people were laughing at me behind my back.
I got some funny looks in Starbucks, but I'm used to that.
It's the thought that counts.
We forget, you know. We Brits forget that we didn't invent civilisation. We forget that Johnny Foreigner might have something to offer us when it comes to matters cultural.
This time last week, I sat in an amphitheatre built almost two-and-a-half-thousand years ago. While the Ancient Greeks (who were in charge of Sicily at the time) sat and watched plays and poetry recitals with Europe's largest active volcano as a picturesque backdrop, the equally ancient yet illiterate Britons were still living in huts, daubing themselves with woad. Politically correct cultural relativism notwithstanding, I know where I stand in the poetry vs woad debate.
Even today, as you walk through the streets of Taormina, things feel very different to back in Blighty: there is no litter; there is no chewing gum polka-dotting the pavements (presumably because everyone still smokes); even on Friday and Saturday nights, there are no drunken louts and loutesses yelling their heads off and vomiting—people simply go for a walk down the main street, windowshopping; the coffee is superb (although the tea, it has to be said, is dire); the food is proper food; people are courteous and friendly (although I did wonder whether they don't go a bit over the top with all their male-on-male kissing); the shop-fronts have retained their individuality, and have not degraded into the standard, British corporate monoculture; there are no in-your-face street hawkers (apart from the occasional flower-seller); there are no advertising hoardings; there are no broken paving stones; everyone seems relaxed and totally unstressed. Yes, you think to yourself, this is all very civilised. Maybe there might be something in the continental lifestyle after all. Maybe, just maybe, we Brits might be able to learn something from our European cousins.
And then you go back to your hotel, and you look down at the bidet, and you think to yourself, Those dirty, dirty bastards!
A big thank you to my mum for my birthday present yesterday: a cardigan. That made me feel a lot younger.
The sad thing is, it's actually rather nice.
Oooh, look! Lots of photos from my recent trip to Sicily.
Mamma-mia! That Fitzroy, he talka too much. Wassa da point offa me atryin' to be all subtle, assayin' I'ma away assortin' outta some 'family business', when he'sa ablabbin' to da whole world that I'ma in Sicily? Cretino! Even Leo aworked it out. Non posso crederci!
That Fitzroy, he hassa no respect. Da horse's head is inna da post.
I'm back!
Actually, I'm not: April Fool!
Admit it, I had you going there for a moment.
Did you hear Jerry Springer interviewed on Front Row on Friday? He explained how he had spent the first five years of his life in London, his Jewish parents' having fled to England from Hitler's Germany…
Fancy escaping the Nazis, living through the Blitz, then calling your son Jerry!