The greatest

8:34am

A marvellous piece by Dominic Lawson on Don Bradman. As he observes: 

[T]oday, 5 August, is a more fitting one to mark Bradman's achievements: he would have been 99.94 years old.

BTW, if you haven't read Jack Fingleton's Brightly Fades the Don, do! It's one of the best ever cricket books, about the 1948 Ashes tour.

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West Side Story - pure genius

7:33am

Mrs P and I went to see West Side Story last week. I was simply going to post here that you should run to the box office to get a ticket; but yesterday I read a bizarre review by Christopher Hart which leaves me wondering whether I should ever pay attention to his scribblings again. He talks of its superficial topicality; calls the piece a 1950s musical pop up; and dismisses it as camp, muscle-bound young men leaping around in jeans and tight T-shirts. 

Is the man devoid of any musical or theatrical sense? The wondrous thing is how a musical premiered fifty years ago not only sounds astonishingly fresh, but how a story which is so clearly of its time is nonetheless so deeply relevant, and says so much about our own times. As for the production - I've seen three so far, and this is by quite a long way the best. It's riveting, and I can only urge you to get a ticket if you can. You won't regret it.

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Land of Hope and Glory needs proper vibrato (The Times)

7:25am

I have a piece in today's Times, on Sir Edward Elgar and vibrato. Here it is:

Romantic that I am, I bought my wife some roses last week. They're now all dead. They still have the look of roses - the stems, the thorns and even the petals. But the petals are shrivelled up and the stems dried out.

I wonder if Sir Roger Norrington, who is to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, has any flowers at home. I do hope not. Because if Sir Roger's approach to flowers matches his approach to music, the ambience in his home will be devoid of any joy.

Let me explain. Sir Roger will conduct Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1, also known as Land of Hope and Glory. Or rather, he is to conduct his own version of it. Because he will ask the orchestra

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More BBC drivel

11:19pm

Oh for God's sake:

I am giving up plastic for the whole of August.

By this I mean not buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.

 

Why not just go and live in a mud hut somewhere in the middle of nowhere? Progress is just so immoral, isn't it?

We pay our licence fee for this sort of nonsense.

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Pull the other one, mate

1:12pm

"Oo do you fink you are? Michael bleedin Schumacher?"

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