pumpkinstrokemarrow

Came across a chap in black lycra yesterday who was neither young nor beautiful but who was holding a bicycle and who was peering through the hedge at some hard core and subsoil piled up outside the Horton Golf Club club house. Closer inspection suggested that he was peering at a bird, at first glance a small sea gull. Closer inspection revealed that it was no such thing, rather a bird perhaps a bit bigger than a missel thrush, bright white breast, grey parts to the head and dark back. Touch of green. Long legs, maybe yellow. Lycra, who was a tweeter, thought that it was a stray greenshanks, blown off course and exhausted, tucking his head under his wing which was why we could not see the distinctive beak. My eyes not good enough to work out that the head was tucked under the wing, in any event I could see no beak.

Not completely convinced, so back home to take a peek at Google which suggests a bird of rather different shape than that we saw and with a long curved beak. Rather longer legs than we saw. Off to the RSPB site - which I do not find very helpful for identification - and the best it could do on the information I was able to supply was plover. Fairly sure it was not one of those. So I think I will pin my colours to the lycra mast and settle for greenshanks, perhaps one of the couple of thousand or so which live in the UK. Continue to be amused by the buzz that a tweeter gets being proportional to the rarity of a tweet in the context. Not bothered in the least that the tweet in question might be as common as muck a few hundred miles across the way. So the tweet gets all hot, bothered, excited - and pleased - about some poor sod of a bird who has strayed big time off course.

A different sort of tweets in the form of trumpets, following the cornetts and sackbuts which came with the Ripieno choir on or about November 22nd. This on the occasion of the Epsom Choral Society (ECS) Christmas Carols, as ECS had managed to procure the services of that eminent television trumpeter, Crispian Steel-Perkins (http://www.crispiansteeleperkins.com/), possibly getting a discount as he is something of a local boy. It turns out that he is quite the showman and also something of an ancient trumpet buff and we were treated to three or four different instruments - including a cornett described on this occasion as an ancient trumpet rather than an ancient oboe, the point being, it seems, that a cornett has the mouthpiece of a trumpet while being similar in other respects to a recorder; made of wood but supposed to be evocative of the horns used by Vikings and such like. Very good he was too, particularly at playing sufficiently quietly to decently provide some highlights to the singing of the choir.

Back at the ranch, we continue the intermittent perusal of Trollope on Cicero (see November 29th), and now of Cicero himself in the form of his Philippics downloaded, in English, from  http://www.gutenberg.org/. Antony does not now seem such a good egg as he did to the bard. Apart from being a drunk, it seems that he was rather partial to killing people so that he could grab their property or because he did not like them very much. And given that Cicero had made these rather intemperate speeches about him, he had a couple of his chaps visit him, chop his head and hands off and have them spiked up on the rostra in the forum for the amusement of the plebs. After which he had his wife shove her hat pin through the offending tongue. However, the Philippics seemed pretty rubbish to me, in translation. Couldn't see a lot of point in pushing on with them. Presumably the chaps illustrated can, having spent a chunk of their valuable academic time on them. I guess they can read the things in the original and properly appreciate the quality of the Latin.

Quality which I am told derives in some part from the ability to play fast and loose with the word order; the various endings to words (the cause of much grief in my early adolescence) allowing one to reconstruct the meaning, a trick that does not work very well at all in English. Oddly, I am also told that Russians do not play this game, despite have one of the more heavily inflected languages hereabouts and despite their being big into poetry.What is wrong with them?