Category Archive

I’ve been rather distracted by football lately.  But not just the Euros on the box – I’ve also been reading You’ll win nothing with kids: fathers, sons and football by Jim White,  sports journalist and manager of his son’s football team.  In it Jim tells the tale of a season which culminated in a cup final and a relegation dogfight, interspersed with the politics of boys’ football and the familial dynamics which led him to take on the mantle of manager.  It’s a generously written and easily read account, full of arch humour and flowing pass and move, with occasional moments of high farce and strong sentiment.  Not unlike a fair number of the matches we’ve seen in Austria and Switzerland this month.

What comes across most strongly is Jim’s affection for the kids in his charge.  His instinctive inclination is to trust them more than any tactical nous he might possess.  His belief in the team pays off and is backed up by the professional help he can’t help himself calling upon while carrying out the day job.  At Manchester United’s Carrington complex, he observes a training session taking place in near silence on the coaches’ part – the only noise is from the youth players themselves.  They are being taught to work things out for themselves.  Jim makes a mental note not to rant and rave on the touchline the following Sunday.

Managing a team which includes your son is a potentially tricky task in the parentally zealous world of boys’ football.  Jim’s pride comes from the fact that Barney makes the task easy by giving his all, even to the point of getting sent of against a side from Germany, and by being distraught after the match at having let the team down.  You’ll win nothing with kids is touching, humble and wise as well as funny.

Reading it brought to mind one of the most memorable moments I’ve had watching football.  In 2002, Ipswich were 1-0 down at Millwall after only five minutes.  As the second half began with the score the same, I realised that the man sitting directly in front of me was signalling to our striker, and incredibly the player did indeed appear to be looking up and taking note.  The striker was Darren Bent, a teenager I’d seen score at Highbury in the semi-final of the FA Youth Cup a couple of seasons before.  That the man in front of me was one of the very few black faces in the away end made the connection obvious – surely this was Darren’s father, communicating where he thought the space was and where his son should situate himself.  Not exactly in the United spirit of self-learning, but ingenious in taking advantage of ethnicity and perspective.  And it came good with only ten minutes of the second half gone, when Darren ran into space on the right and tucked the ball away at the keeper’s near post.  Any goal your team scores is celebrated with a degree of emotion, but – from where I was standing – that one more than most.

This really should have been a Tangents article.

A couple of years ago, Tangents would have been for several reasons the perfect forum in which to rave about Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting: intertwined lives of American writers and artists (Vintage).  The book explores the moments or points at which pairs or trios of artists’ and writers’ lives intersected or gently touched against each other and in so doing it becomes a celebration of literature, art, photography, and cinema, as well as of the common ideas connecting their forms and the lives of their makers.  Then there is the felicity – almost certainly unknown on the author’s part – of its echo of (the group) Josef K’s finest moment, and its probably known and knowing nod to a Brief encounter-esque sense of romance; for Rachel Cohen’s book is as much about what is left unsaid as about what history records as having been said.  Its acceptance and understanding that writers come in all shapes and sizes, that some write of a life of adventure in snatched moments between one escapade or assignation and the next, and others form adventure from a solitary life of sedentary reflection, is the literary equivalent of the stuff in which Tangents dealt over its ten year history.

In truth, beyond the shared title, there’s not much to link Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting with Josef K’s ‘Chance meeting’, other than the somewhat deliberate circumstance of individual taste, and the suggestive nature of the song’s lyric, reprising the tone of David Lean’s film and Noel Coward’s screenplay:

‘The red sky behind you
The feeling you’ve been here before
You lived in the past dear
With things we all gave up then
I met you again there
But this time it weren’t for real’

But connections spark and snake in all directions as you read, inevitably going beyond the ones that Cohen herself makes, or gently presents without comment, like Willa Cather meeting Flaubert’s niece, and writing up the encounter in an essay called “A chance meeting”, or the title of the novel written by one of her subjects, W.D. Howells, A chance acquaintance.  Mention of Joseph Cornell will necessarily stir the attention of any fan of the Clientele’s music.  The story Cohen tells is this:

In 1943, Joseph Cornell wrote to Marianne Moore to thank her for some small amount of praise for a collage of his illustrating a story in an arts magazine.  The salutation was held up by an armadillo, armoured animals exerting a fascination for Moore displayed in her poetry, and Cornell wrote that her words were ‘the only concrete reaction I’ve had so far, and they satisfy and affect me profoundly.’  Cornell was voicing the gratitude that a deliberately lonely artist starved of reaction suffers through long years of obscurity.  His inclination was to fall in love with anyone who paid him attention, all the more so because it was someone he admired.  It led to an exchange of gently romantic letters, and to a meeting, though whether strictly speaking you could call it a chance one is debateable.  Of the meeting itself nothing can be said but that Moore saw Cornell’s basement workshop and his boxes-in-progress.  But Rachel Cohen gives us the tenor of their almost exclusively epistolary relationship and describes presents Cornell sent by post (a valentine of worm-work paper and an ancient book of rare animals), treading softly through the facts to offer from inside each story telling perspectives such as her notion that ‘people very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them, almost as if they were sending specimens to a zoological expert in order to find out the precise genus and Latin name.’

Along with three dozen other such encounters between writers, artists, photographers, thinkers, critics (and Charlie Chaplin), the book also narrates the second and third meetings between Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, which rested on Duchamp answering a phone call by chance.  Duchamp gives Cornell a present, perfect in its symbolism: ‘He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.’

Cohen’s book is full of such anecdotal gifts, but it is also strong on the way art forms and their purveyors rub off on (and up against) each other, and on the artistic urge which drives their creations, their lives, their relationships with the people to whom they are drawn and the ones from whom they retreat.  With its contextualised counsel from one writer or artist to another, it becomes a creative primer, and a caution against the wasting away of talent.

Carefully chosen photographs inform the text.  Richard Avedon’s 1960 picture of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham is terrific; the laughing trio look like a particularly joyful early 1980s New York indie band.  Cohen’s description of the daguerreotype of Henry James Senior and Junior – ‘disturbing in the ghostly aliveness of its subjects’ – also stands for her own book.  She makes what must have been painstaking research seem effortless, stitching it into the whole so that you barely notice the thread binding the material together, and all without a footnote in sight.  There is empathy with all of her subjects, but not always sympathy –  for example, she has little time for the shellac vanity of Katherine Anne Porter.

Neither does she make more of the connections than there is.  Beyond the intrinsic pleasure she presents readers, she concentrates on her essential job, which is to make them want to go away and read the books of those of whom they were previously unaware; in my case William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett, the lesser known works of Mark Twain and Willa Cather, and maybe even Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.  But she still allows me to draw the line at Gertrude Stein, and set me imagining the context of meetings that happened between artists of my own cultural acquaintance.  I’ve often wondered whether – as well as serve coffee to Thomas Mann when working in a dining hall – the young Jack Kerouac really did pass Thomas Wolfe on Brooklyn Bridge in a ‘raging blizzard’, as he reports in Vanity of Duluoz, and whether Wolfe might have taken the young football star for a drink if Kerouac had mustered the courage to speak to him.

In White bicycles: making music in the 1960s Joe Boyd writes of playing Nick Drake to John Cale, and of the amazed and excited Cale going round to see the young singer there and then, a seemingly improbable meeting of the confident Welshman and the diffident Englishman which the very next day resulted in the recording of ‘Northern sky’ and ‘Fly’.  The fleshed-out story behind an easily missed credit on the sleeve of Bryter later.

These connections, both real in terms of lives touching each other, and imagined, in the sense of the artistic repercussions of such encounters, are made of much the same stuff that informs A chance meeting.  And any regular readers of Tangents who have ventured into these obscure parts are guaranteed to enjoy it as much as I did.  Or your money back.

Interesting to note in this interview with David Peace that the first game of football to which he was taken by his father was also the very first of Brian Clough’s time at the helm of Leeds United, a friendly against Huddersfield Town.  That goes a long way to explaining the psychological genesis of the idea for The damned Utd, as few things can make a greater impression on a youngster than their first sight of the emerald green turf at the centre of a football stadium slowly filling up with tens of thousands of people.

There are fourteen pieces of puff on the covers or inside the British paperback edition of David Peace’s The damned Utd (Faber), a fictional recreation of Brian Clough’s short tenure at the helm of Leeds United.  All of them are by men.

It’s safe to say that not many women are going to feel any pull to immerse themselves in the all-male world of a top-ranking football club in 1974.  For legal and no doubt more honourable reasons, Clough’s wife is a necessarily neutral figure, an adumbration against the flesh and blood portrayal of football’s greatest-ever motivator.  There is therefore nothing to leaven the weight of masculinity in the book, no Sam Tyler to challenge Gene Hunt with 21st century values, as in Life on Mars.  Instead – inevitably, unavoidably – the reader is fed a non-stop diet of ciggies, brandy, swearing and enmity (though it strikes me that I may just have listed the chief ingredients of a girls’ night out in the Leeds of 2008).

The hellfire and damnation of Clough’s six weeks at Leeds are cleverly intertwined with the glories and troubles of his career to that point, and a convincing portrayal of a monomaniacal manager emerges, one that lives up to the originality and simplicity of the idea – that a novel focussing on those forty-four days could be written from inside the head of the man at the centre of the whirlwind.  The episode, and Brian Clough’s subsequent achievements with Nottingham Forest, must have coloured the young David Peace’s understanding of the game, beautiful or otherwise, as much as it did not only mine, but a whole generation of technically undernourished football lovers and players.  I envy him the moment of inspiration in which the idea crystallised.

Now I’m off to read some chick-lit so that my feminine side can reassert itself.

While discussing ‘Phenomenal cat’ in his balanced and context-embracing take on The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (Continuum), Andy Miller excavates the following quote by Kinks’ bassist Pete Quaife:

‘I just let the whole flower people, L.S.D., love thing flow over my head.  I just laughed at it.  The trouble is it changed a lot of good blokes, who everybody rated, into creeps.  Instead of expanding minds, L.S.D. seemed to close minds into little boxes and made a lot of people very unhappy.  You still can’t beat going to the pictures, a couple of pints and a fag.  The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realisation of heaven.’

Which might be thought a somewhat passé thing to declare but for the fact that Pete was saying it in November 1967, directly after the Summer of Love.

Miller’s exploration of Ray Davies’ idealised village green is mind-expanding in the non-chemically induced sense, showing just how out of step with the times the Kinks became in the space of a few short months.  Evidently it didn’t help that the Kinks’ record label, Pye, were also at odds with the times.  Together with last minute changes of heart by the perfectionist Davies, the mockers were put on the record at the moment of its release, and only the passing of time has corrected the silence that greeted it.

Still I wish that ‘Mr. Songbird’ had made the Preservation Society’s final cut, and not the throwaway floweriness of that minor concession to the times, ‘Phenomenal cat’.  But the songs were up against the shifting preferences and inner conflicts of Ray Davies, and so, rather than a perfect LP, we are left with an almost perfect one.

A Peel listener with archival tendencies, I was always going to be a sucker for The Peel sessions, Ken Garner’s updated version of his earlier book In session tonight.  The story of how the sessions developed within the BBC is fascinating, and producers like Peel’s first at Radio One, Bernie Andrews, emerge from the background as stubborn, innovative heroes without whom Peel could not have had the impact he did.  It also makes you fully understand why, despite the protection afforded him by Andrews and John Walters, Peel always feared for his airtime at Radio One, his standing balanced against any new controller’s desire to make their mark by tinkering with schedules in which Peel stood out like a sore thumb.

It takes a little over a hundred pages to list the 4,400-odd sessions, personnel and track listing and all.  Your eye alights at every turn on great ones.  Laugh’s two very different sessions recorded less than eighteen months apart, before and after their Sensation number one reinvention.  The second Last Party, the one with ‘The full English breakfast’ and ‘Purple Hazel’.  The first P.J. Harvey.  Sudden Sway’s inventive non-musical interventions.  You cannot put a price on the oddities that Peel presented to formative minds.

Then there are those I might have heard but cannot recollect, like the second Autechre, for which the entry states that Peel, presented with an untitled session sheet, made up the titles himself: ‘Gelk’, ‘Blifil’, ‘Gaekwad’ and ‘19 headaches’.

Of particular interest are the mythic times before I became a Peel listener.  What are the sessions recorded by the Kinks in 1967, ’68, ’72 and ’74 like?  Also in 1968, the first of a succession of Bridget St. John sessions went before the fearsomely crusty and anachronistic institution of the BBC’s audition panel, who commented that it was ‘pretentious rubbish… her guitar playing is inaccurate and uninspired and her voice dull.’  Despite this, Bridget got a ‘borderline pass’ and so her session was broadcast.  From the early eighties, the first James session, and a subsequent and evidently much less well-known Fire Engines session in contrast to the much lauded and traded first.  ‘Young tongues need taste’, ‘Qualitamatic’, ‘Produced to seduce to’ and ‘The big wrong time’ were first broadcast on 23 November 1981.  On titles alone, it ought to be as renowned as the first, but interviewed by Innes Reekie in 2005 for a great but never formally published article, Davy Henderson said, ‘Around the time of the second John Peel session, we were shit…  Our compass was a fake…  We should have trusted our internal magnets…  We should have trusted our inability.’

So is Davy right, or does the music deliver on the promise of the titles?

Counter-intuitive it may be, but rather than hearing another paean to your favourite group it’s often more rewarding to read about why someone likes music with which you have no familiarity, that you are not interested in, or even actively dislike.  It challenges your preconceptions, widens possibilities, enlarges your rationale for listening to music.  Do it regularly enough and preconceptions are minimised and maybe even disappear.

When I came across Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, the title I was initially drawn to was Let it be, Colin Meloy’s memoir built on the raw and rugged substance of that album by the Replacements.  I’ve never knowingly listened to the Replacements, and have only ever been mildly inclined to seek them out, despite a certain fascination with their fucked-up mystique.  I was keen to learn more, and as curious to see how they were important to Meloy, whose group the Decemberists I have listened to as much as any since Alistair first mentioned them in dispatches on Tangents.  How great it was to work my way through the songs of a writer whose twin fascinations were historical narrative and life on the ocean, putting these to work against a well-defined musical sensibility to say more about the 21st century than anyone else seemed to care to do.

As it turns out, few of Colin’s pages go into any detail about the actual sound made by the Replacements on Let it be, and nor does he go out of his way to say exactly why he was attracted to the music of the Replacements rather than that of x, y or z, save for a sense of identification; that being from Minnesota, the ‘Placemats’ must have endured the same frozen winters and backwater culture as the young Colin in Helena, Montana.  They could be the band making the glorious racket in the garage down the street.

Colin’s story is all about agency and context – cultural, familial and social.  He writes about how a love of music arises out of the ashes of childhood, how in adolescence that love becomes so engulfing that it blinds you to everything else, and how slowly but surely you determine that you must become a participant.  At some point along the line you establish in your mind a connection with a band that are where you want to be.  It doesn’t matter whether this connection is real or illusory; what matters is that it’s conceivable.

Colin might have taken his musical rites of passage further, to the point where he has established a fully-functioning band, rather than end it arbitrarily at the point when he dares to dance aged fourteen with a girl in a bar.  But his take on Let it be captures something infrequently documented as well as it is here – the girl- or boyhood dreams, influences and life of the mind of a future musician.  And as with the gliding narrative lyricism of his songs, he gives the reader enough to generate the universal from the specific, letting us draw our own conclusions and parallels.

Certainly I’ve a greater curiosity to hear Let it be having read Colin’s memoir, but its immediate effect has been to send me back to the Decemberists first three albums, reflect again on the slight disappointment of the fourth, The crane wife, on which their lightness of touch deserts them from time to time, and hope that this is restored on the fifth.  While we await that, there’s the self-explanatory Colin Meloy sings live! to look forward to.

For his BBC 4 programme Pop! What is it good for?, Paul Morley asked Simon Armitage to dissect the lyric of ‘This charming man’, one of six songs chosen as a handful to illustrate the greatness and (im)perfection of pop (the others were ‘Can’t get you out of my head’, ‘Ride a white swan’, ‘Lola’, Adam Faith’s What do you want’ and ‘Freak like me’) – a first draft for the slot on Desert island discs that he may never quite receive as due reward for years of service to the BBC.

Armitage described the line ‘this man said it’s gruesome that someone so handsome should care’ as ‘glittery and swanky and luxurious’.  Sadly the lit crit stopped short of the borrowed line which gives this blog its title, so issues of quotation and allusion weren’t discussed.  I chose the line because it extends the sequence of titles of fanzines I wrote in the eighties, but also for something like the same reasons PM chose ‘Ride a white swan’ – for the transformational impact it had on my life.  I can’t claim that A jumped-up pantry boy is consistent with any of those three adjectives, but hey, even a writer with spartan tendencies has time for a little glittery luxury in his blogging life.

PM’s enthusiasm for his subject, spinning off from the six chosen songs into many others, made me want to catch up with Words and music: a history of pop in the shape of a city, the book in which I guess some of these ideas were first espoused: pop as ‘a sensational metaphysical adventure’; ‘all great pop songs are great because you can imagine them sung by Elvis’ (a notion backed up by a half-decent impersonator giving three of the songs a go).  But he could have tried a little harder not to engineer the subject of the Art of Noise being brought up if he was going to be so bashful about it.  Nevertheless the programme is well worth catching via one of the many repeats BBC 4 content gets (the next is 1.10 a.m. on Sunday 13th January) or the BBC’s iPlayer.

‘Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water.  Shelves tipped over.  Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row.  He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages.  He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come.  It surprised him.  That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.  He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.’

The UK paperback edition comes festooned with plaudits, so it hardly needs one more, but The road by Cormac McCarthy is yet another outstanding novel by the Tex-Mex master.  That the praise is unanimous is a sign of the stripped-down force of McCarthy’s writing – few if any can withstand its tender asperity.  Sparser than the separate parts of the Border trilogy, no less merciless in its depiction of brutality than that trio or Blood Meridian, The road is one of the most devastating – and devastatingly bleak – works of fiction ever written.  A cautionary tale of such concentration and strength that it unnerves you even to imagine the author imagining it.  But not as much as sensing how dangerously close we are to its cheerless vision of the future becoming a reality.

If ever there were an argument for the political power of art which resides in a place apparently far away from politics or connected to it by the thinnest of threads, then The road is it.

I’m sure customer reviews have been the subject of many a blog commentary since the fateful day when an evil marketing genius at Amazon realised that very few people go out of their way to slag off cultural artefacts they don’t like, but many will find the time to rave about their own taste if only you give them a platform and a little encouragement (the gold star of becoming a top ten or top one hundred or even top thousand reviewer).  As a blogger of independent breeding and as someone who always predicts casualties when the guerrilla forces of art enter into skirmishes with the disciplined, state-sponsored army of business (or is it the other way round now?), I find it hard to understand why people put themselves at the service of Amazon rather than set up on their own.  Granted, they find a ready-made audience unavailable elsewhere, and certainly their commentary can be as helpful as that of the traditional critical media, once you unpick agendas and prejudices and contrast the whims of their taste with your own.  And at least you don’t have to spend any time working out which readership tastes the editor says the reviewer generally should not offend.

For my two pennyworth on the subject I would like to take the existing two customer reviews for the revised edition of Nick Cave’s Complete lyrics as the starting point.  One is by Jason Parkes, who – as amazon.co.uk’s number 7 reviewer – haunts my every online purchasing move, and no doubt yours too.  He generally dispenses accurate and considered information, despite five stars being his default setting (just like Caroline ‘three stars’ Sullivan in the Guardian) and a tendency to think that everything Julian Cope’s ever done is great.  But I still find myself asking why, even as I make my latest Amazon purchase.  Why would you subjugate yourself to the rivers of money flowing into Amazon’s coffers?  Perhaps his habit formed before blogging properly took off.  It can be hard to jump ship and swim for the nearest isolated tropical island paradise, with just macaques and parrots for company.  A publishing platform can make copy addicts of us all, after all.

The other review, by ‘A reader’ and is hilariously serious.  If it were a blog posting it would merely be serious and to some extent in keeping with both its notional subject (Nick Cave) and its actual subject (the critical interpretation of lyrics when those lyrics have been divested of their accompanying music).  But to use a product review as a means of dispensing clunky portions of literary theory and reflections on the nature of a work of art is in my book a bizarre use of one’s time, although I suppose you could argue that it’s a form of critical busking, maybe in the hope that the editor of the Times Educational Supplement or the London Review of Books happens to wander by and sign you up on the spot.

Ah well.  It was six years ago that ‘A reader’ posted his or her essay.  Web sophistication accelerates exponentially.  Besides, ‘how you do it is no business of mine / it just passes time, passes time’, as Gruff Rhys once sang.

Hurrah!  Alistair’s back in action here in a nostalgic, fictional vein and here, where he’s set me a task.  As this might to some extent help to unmask the shadowy figure variously known as A jumped-up pantry boy and A wild, slim alien, I accept the challenge.  I’ve to set down ‘8 things people don’t know about you’.

1. I dislike, nay abhor, lists in both journalistic and canonical senses and yet I am an obsessive list-maker.  The list of the lists I make would be a long one.

2. At the age of twelve I was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter syndrome – dodgy knees, essentially – and was excused from school sports for three years.  Bang went my chances of playing for Ipswich Town.  Yes, I am a frustrated would-be professional footballer as well as frustrated would-be pop star.  Osgood-Schlatter – sounds like a fantasy Chelsea strike force.

I also had a ranula and came very close to being presented as a case study to medical students.

3. My hypochondria is in remission.

4. I was offered the editorship of the jazz section of Venue, Bristol’s listings magazine, one week before I was due to leave the city for good.  I left and the saxophone has never loomed quite as large in my life since.

5. The first group I saw live was the Boomtown Rats at the Ipswich Gaumont.  I recently bought their Best of for £3 to hear again songs which were staples of my pre-teen listening.  They certainly had energy, and Geldof wrote taut, catchy tunes employing relatively intricate arrangements and day-glo lyrical imagery.  My retrospective opinion of them artistically is that they are holed beneath the waterline by Bob’s histrionic vocal braying – rodent by name and asinine by nature.  The CD has an extensive sleeve note by novelist Joseph O’Connor, brother of Sinead, which articulates nicely how a brash gobshite can become number one in a young boy’s heart.

6. I was one of the hundred or so people injured during the poll tax riots around Trafalgar Square in 1990.  Reflexively I headed a brick which had bounced off the side of a police van, still dreaming of playing for Ipswich.  The doctor who treated me at University College Hospital had a flat top and wore a bright yellow tie.  It hurt my eyes almost as much as the brick hurt my head.

7. The book I would most like to read has not yet been published; there may not yet even be a complete draft.  It is the long-awaited third segment of the journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor made across Europe in the 1930s, written from the perspective of age, looking back on a fearless and carefree period of his life with a longing well-disguised by the freshness of the recollection.  A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) contain some of the best prose ever written.

‘Memory encircles [Prague] with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine.  I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream.’

But beware, for when reading PLF you are often set adrift on a doldrum-esque sea of digression.  One chapter can maroon you for days.  Yet in others you are zipped along with a zephyr behind you.

8. I am both young and old enough to have an ‘O’ level in Computer science.  My generation is the one which straddles the jump from manual, predominantly sequential ways of writing to the non-linear facility that word processors offer or promote.  Leaving aside form, style, or the knight’s move around an oversize chessboard which determined the chapter sequence in Georges Perec’s Life a user’s manual, we have had to learn about the effect of the physical process on writing twice.  I have moved from pasting pieces of typewritten text onto master artwork to copying text from word editors into WYSIWYG blog generators.  I am participating in the current, moving into the future, but my brain was hot-wired in the past.  There must already be plenty of younger writers who have never written anything substantial longhand.  I wonder if, sick at some point of the keyboard, they will pick up a pen to see how it feels, to see what happens.

I believe I’m supposed to tag five or eight people with the task of continuing this meme but as a diffident novice, I don’t feel I know any other blogger well enough to presume this of them.  So this branch of a chain dies with me.  Not for the first time.