Never do anything drastic.

Apart from the obvious bad handwriting, it is suffering from being crammed full of things to do.

There is only one way to deal with this. Take every available minute off.

This gives more time for bolging etc.

I overdid things today and needed to take two paracetomol to alleviate a severe mild headache.

Worse still, I needed to go out twice.

I like to keep going out to an absolute minimum of once per day, keeping in mind that I am going to have to go out to Asda tonight (as well) due to the cupboard being bare, it will be pushing to the absolute limit, my capacity for house-external obligations.

Here's a little bit of cooking I did over in Egypt recently.

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.

You wanna go where people know,
people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows
your name.

Does anybody realise that it's going to be 2010 in 23 months time?

48 Hours Ago: Driving home from playing bridge (card game).

36 Hours Ago: Teaching the Piano.

24 Hours Ago: Driving home from an evening with friends in Bedford.

18 Hours Ago: Listening to tennis on the radio.

12 Hours Ago: Lunch with mother.

6 Hours Ago: Composing music for flute.

3 Hours Ago: Eating Pasta.

2 Hours Ago: Indulging in Telephonic correspondence

1 Hour Ago: Studying Sibelius Symphony No.3

Now: Writing this blog post.

1 Hour from now: Late night radio/thinking about sleeping.

2 Hours from now: Sleeping (hopefully)

3 Hours from now: Mid-sleep visitation.

6 Hours from now: Oh yes, I'll be up and at it, not.

12 Hours from now: Might decide to get dressed at this point.

18 Hours from now: Attending Mozart's Magic Flute at Covent Garden.

24 Hours from now: Driving back from the Opera.

36 Hours from now: Posting a letter to Australia.

48 Hours from now: Checking email.

Can anyone tell me how to block emails from any one given sender?

How about deleting a message with a massive file attachment while it is wasting time downloading. Can one kill it mid-download?

"So, do you get many aardvarks reading your blog, then?"

"Oh, about a thousand a week."

I have avoided watching this film for 31 years, but last night I was entertained by circa the first 40 minutes of it with friends in Bedford. Sadly, we were too busy to watch the whole film, but I was most impressed by the acting of Sir Alec Guinness - truly Star quality.

Friends need to see what this person is trying to do over at Alec's page. We are not 'that' sort of website.

http://alphamin.blog.co.uk/2008/01/24/fuckwit_lord_collins~3626933

We do not know his real name. Apparently he changed it to Lord Collins which is his passport name.

Calling yourself Lord anything if you haven't been called to that title by the Queen and/or the Prime Minister is the height of pretension.

Lord Collins is therefore by definition, a pretentious person.

Furthermore, his surname was not originally Collins. This new surname was chosen because of the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Collins_(Irish_leader)

A dubious choice in my opinion.

I have changed my name a couple of times (so far). Currently, my middle name is Socrates named after the father of philosophy - a fine choice I feel!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates

He calls himself Swami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami

Whether he is fully entitled to do so, I (again) feel dubious.

By trade, he is a Yoga teacher. Nothing wrong there. Well done, in fact.

But does it give him the right to come on to BCUK and try to wind up our novelist, Alec Weston? I think not. Here's what I wrote over at Alec's page earlier today:

Now listen to me "Swami" or whatever you are calling yourself today. I am sure you are a very fine and even possibly a 'qualified' yoga teacher. Well done you. A lot of us on this site are qualified teachers. My day job is teaching the Piano (for example) although I aspire to become a world famous composer. RunDontWalk, a much respected blogger on these pages has asked for a less mean-spirited approach between visitors to these pages. Why does someone aged 68 need to use personal offensive unconstrucitve-criticism/abuse or simply plain 'slagging' off or 'sledging' in the way that you have in your last two messages? To truly merit the title 'Swami' this kind of behaviour should be several light years beneath your dignity. You are coming across as a "yah boo sucks" onanistic schoolboy type. Surely, this is not your intention? No one needs enemies. I think you'd better decide carefully whether you wish to continue your presence on this blogging site which is typified by friendship of a seriously deep (and almost dare I use the word as an atheist) religious level. Over and out.

http://alphamin.blog.co.uk/2008/01/24/fuckwit_lord_collins~3626933

If Derby play a derby, who is it against?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_derby

My friends who were located in Luton have decided to move even further out - to Bedford. This means a trip up takes further planning ahead and has to be treated somewhat like a military campaign.

Banana sandwiches, chocolate snacks and endless bottles of mineral water are de rigeur for this Everestian Motorway assault.

Leaving here at around 4.45pm the estimated time of arrival is 18.00 and we are going to be booted out by 23.31 so everything has been planned to a 'T'.

Anyway, hopefully a good time will be had by one and all & normal blogging service will be resumed on Sunday.

My 2nd Blogiversary falls (yet again) on Burns night.

Extract from 25.1.06

Another busy day at the office. Drank some coffee, shouted at a few children and considered getting someone else to mow the lawn.

Extract from 27.1.07

I had a friend who went through a Swedish girl craze during the late 80's. We were sitting in a cafe when he suddenly decided to pounce on a Swedish girl at an adjacent table (metaphorically, not literally). The upshot of it was that we were both invited back to her place.

It was a most pleasant evening as I recall it.

We were served tea and cake and invited to help to write a poem (in English rather than Swedish) about one of the other girls living in the house. There were about six of these Swedes sharing a rather nice house in a suburb of London (I think, Golders Green).

It was a long and rambling poem. We were fed the info for each stanza in broken English prose and had to 'poeticize' it line by line.

The girls had struck lucky really as my friend had written song lyrics (at least one of which was close to getting into the charts) and I am a bit of an orthodox poet with a knowledge of anapest, hexameter and other such things.

Sadly, the poem has been lost to posterity, but at least now there's this blog posting.

I am thinking of cultivating a new image.

How does this grab people?

I believe it was A.A.Milne who first used this spelling in his famous stories of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The rest of you can use the normal spelling from now on!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_the_Pooh

I was in Asda earlier this evening and as I walked in, I noticed a lady with a microphone in her hand.

No sooner had I walked up a couple of fruity aisles than an announcement (of a very dull nature) took place.

I just know that if I’d have had that microphone, things would have been different!

“Attention all shipping, we are cruising at an altitude of ninety feet. Do not be alarmed. Any difficulties you are experiencing are due to Victorian smog. Rat poison is available at the checkout counters, please ask a member of staff if you can try a free sample. Thank you for your inattention.”

It’s not so much a matter of whether I would get fired on the first day, it’s more, would I make it to the lunch-break.

List two or three seriously obscure facts about yourself.

1. From 1962 to 1987, my next door neighbour was Derek. However, from 1987 onwards, my next door neighbour has been Eric.

2. The first place I visited outside of the UK was Maureillas in France where I was introduced to the game (or possibly, sport) Pétanque.

http://www.catalanvilla.info/surrounding.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A9tanque

3. I own two orange sofas. (OK that is probably not that obscure, but a) orange is my favourite colour and b) this obscure fact can be verified by a handful of bolgers that have visited Mozart House).

Regarding general house style "acceptable" to the bolging community:

"...appear to be on an even keel, urbane more or less normal. That's the note to strike here, isn't it? Eccentric, but not loony."

I have to agree that that is indeed the 'normal' note to strike! Not that everyone should do this 7/24 but it is something to aspire to.

Now I've got to nip off and ring the doorbells of some nearby neighbours who believe in early nights (and then run away as fast as my legs will carry me).

Have you ever appeared on TV?
School choir trip to Berlin to sing Bach's Mass in B Minor in 1970. Appeared on German TV.

Ever been on the radio?
I used to be one of Clive Bull's regular callers in the mid-1980's on LBC (I was "Nigel of Edgware"; at the time I did not realise that "Sven of Hampstead" was Peter Cook). My music has been broadcast on a few stations, the most prominent of these being ABC Classic FM, Australia. My eBay auction for a broken pencil was broadcast on Five Live, Heart FM and Iain Lee's prog on LBC.

Do you have a friend who is famous?
A number of my friends have cut CDs. Some have even recorded my compositions on those CDs.

Have you ever had your name in the papers?
Many times. I've had strings of press reviews for music performances and been interviewed on at least ten occasions. I'm trying to put all that behind me now, though!

Any school friend gone on to be famous?
Damon Hill.

Title: Split Personality

One of my friends posing in the 'gap' of a street sculpture on the South Bank. You can see part of the Millennium Wheel (The London Eye) in the background.

1. Conduct a famous Orchestra.

2. Be on one of those pretentious art-type programmes on TV.

3. Meet up with my old school-chum Damon Hill, again.

4. Get a job as a University Professor.

5. Become an A-list celebrity so that I can go head-to-head with Stephen Fry on Countdown.

Well, another smooth transition from dawn to dusk with only the very minimum of activity occurring between these two extremeties.

I dare say the rest of you have had a constructive hump day earthquakes and hurricanes notwithstanding.

Hello, my name is Mr Stoat, I am a cuddly toy and not at all stout, all day long I've been watching a boat, but now I can't hang about, I've got to go off for my float... and there's no need to shout!

Further to my telephonic communications with answerphones last week, I have made a step in the right direction.

The following happened three times in a row.

I phone someone up, they answer the phone in person but then, as luck would have it, they have to get off the phone within ten seconds flat.

I dare say something urgent has cropped up; I dare say their time is in great demand; I dare say spending all day on the phone is not the most efficient use of time; still, I oughtn't to take it personally.

If I am writing something like this
...........and I wish to position the second line thus!
but, without resorting to having to write dots
...........how can I put in a para indent of blank space to make the line
start a little way into the rest of the text?

I have a minute to five-o'-clock.

"I dare say they are worked hard, I dare say they don't altogether like it, I dare say theirs is an unpleasant experience on the whole; but they people the landscape for me, they give it a poetry for me, and perhaps that is one of the pleasanter objects of their existence." [Referring to Slavery on the American Plantations.]

BLEAK HOUSE - Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

I was joint third in CJ's photo comp #1 and feel encouraged to pick up something snappy for next time around.

I have been browsing the following website:

http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/home.html

And am tempted by the following items:

http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/528023/art/sony/cyber-shot-dsc-w55-silver.html

http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/626756/art/sony/cyber-shot-dsc-t25.html

Does anyone remember the following piece of trash TV?

http://www.ukgameshows.com/page/index.php/Mr_and_Mrs

In view of Gay Weddings, Civil Ceremonies and the like, I wonder how this show might be relaunched?

A final point, if you are bi-, can you have a husband and a wife?

You'll 'get' the above if you glance at 'the below'.

Now I'm too exhausted to go into details after writing such a great blog-title, but you'll know what I mean.

Can anyone put me in touch with a purveyor of left-handed dental floss?

Do you ever get the feeling that you are twisting the Pepper Mill but nothing is coming out of the bottom?

Hmm... whether I wake up early or late I still feel zonked out in the mornings.

Conclusion. It's not a good idea to wake up.

In Greek mythology, Cerberus or Kerberos (Greek Κέρβερος, Kérberos, "demon of the pit") was the hound of Hades, a monstrous three-headed dog with a snake for a tail (sometimes said to have 50 or 100 heads) called a hellhound. Other hell hounds included Orthus, his two headed brother. Cerberus