PotCXXVpouri

 After a short gap, wargaming returned to the legendary blah blah with a Seven Years War game. Unusually we didn't use James and Peter's period specific rules (whose name I forget but it has something to do with lemons) in favour of playing Field of Battle virtually as published - at least to start with. We hadn't played them for a rather long time, but gradually remembered what it was we didn't like and so changed it as we went along. James has written up the first evening here, at the end of which we gave the Russians a shed load more morale so we'd get another evening out of it. That ploy worked a treat and the second evening ebbed and flowed quite a bit more than the first, but the better quality of the Prussian commanders proved too much for the Russians in the end.

And speaking of wargaming, it may return to the annexe next week for the first time in months. Having just cracked the problem of how to delineate dead ground in front of bastions, the logical thing would have been to play a siege game. However, instead I have cleared all that and set-up some Napoleonic Command and Colours. The motive for this was a request from my plumber who, having seen games in progress on previous visits, asked on this occasion (new U-bend on the bathroom washbasin) if he could have a game himself sometime. It is, of course, always worth keeping in with a good plumber (*).

In other news, the pigeon (see here for to which pigeon I refer) has gone. We finally did what should have been done a long time ago; i.e. captured her and took her off to International Pigeon Rescue. I didn't participate in that last element myself, but my henchwoman who did reported back that the organisation was impressively resourced, with staff who were well meaning, knowledgeable and every bit as bonkers as you would expect.

* Or indeed any other tradesman.

The Onion

The onion, now that’s something else.

Its innards don’t exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there’s only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a peace,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.

Nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions’ secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.

        -   Wisława Szymborska

Mrs Thurston Kicks the Dog

 “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” -  Søren Kierkegaard

I have been away walking. The photo is of me climbing up the Long Mynd, or to be precise of me taking one of quite a few breaks as I climbed up the Long Mynd. I should perhaps have done some practice climbs up Otley Chevin before I went.

Sine my return I've only had time to catch up with the absolutely essential stuff: listening to the cricket, going to the opera, reading Private Eye etc. In the Rotten Boroughs section of the last one I was interested to see a reference to Magister Militum. The specific target of their criticism (you'll have to buy a copy if you want to find out the details) is the Tory leader of Wiltshire council, who it transpires is the owner what the magazine describe as the toy soldier supplier. I'm normally very happy to use the term 'toy soldiers' in these pages and elsewhere, but I wouldn't give 15mm figures to real children, as opposed to overgrown children.