"To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable." - John Milton
The reason for my absence is a rather mundane one: I have broken my glasses. The reserve pair are OK for distance, but not so good for close up; using the computer has to be rationed, and this blog is frankly not much of a priority. I may be gone for some time.
Let me leave you for now with a couple of photos whose quality has definitely not been improved by my not being able to see very well. The Tour de Yorkshire has been through Otley, twice in fact. This is a little bit of the women's race and a lot of the back of the younger Miss Epictetus' head:
And this is the first of this year's English asparagus to reach the Casa Epictetus, served on buckwheat pancakes with anchovy, garlic and chilli breadcrumbs. For the record I overdid the chilli:
So, yet another plea for me not to bother writing about wargaming. It's beginning to seem as if my poorly taken photographs of badly painted plastic figures have failed to elevate me to the ranks of the hobby aristocracy. However, it also looks like actual wargaming is back on the menu in the legendary wargames room of James 'Olicanalad' Roach, who according to one of the comments on his blog a couple of years ago is 'a wargaming demi-god'. I suppose it gives the rest of us something to aim at. Anyway, prior to that let's have some more random, but - according to Google - fascinating, stuff:
Starting with the blog itself, something else I noticed when looking at the stats was that the post with lowest number of hits in the whole five years or so was this recent one, which notwithstanding the title is actually a report on a wargame. Self-evidently I don't have terribly high standards, but even so I thought that post was OK; perhaps wargaming really does put people off.
The rat is back. Or possibly one of his mates, or a distant cousin, or a friend of a friend. Beyond freaking out the cleaners it hasn't done any positive harm yet, but poison seems disappointingly ineffective so all other options, short of getting a cat, are being considered.
I have been for a reiki session, and have to say that whilst my chakras remain much as they ever were it was extremely relaxing; positively enjoyable in fact. I'm not sure I'd pay for it, but for free it was excellent value for money. It came about because a friend is studying to become a reiki master (as an aside there doesn't seem to be any other level of practitioner; I rather assumed with it being Japanese that one would ascend many differently coloured intermediate levels first) and was casting about for volunteers to practice on. Sadly the prospect of more free sessions in the future is slim because the rapprochement between myself and Coral Laroc - for it was she - didn't last long and we are once again estranged (I didn't send her a birthday card, mistakenly assuming she would prefer the immediacy of a text).
I know you like to keep up with what I'm listening to as I write the blog. This time it's been the Grateful Dead's concert at the Swing Auditorium, San Bernadino, February 26th 1977, but I can't believe that any of you have the amount of free time necessary to join me in that so instead Joan Jett will sing a song especially for our newly discovered French readers:
Happy May
Day comrades. Another month has passed I see, with absolutely zippo achieved
wargaming wise. There haven't even been many games played; the last action was
my ultimately futile
dash across the bridge for the village in the game specially designed to show off James' new pontoon train. And that, dear readers, is why I've had
to pad out the blog with all sorts of other irrelevant stuff, as I shall now
proceed to do again.
I have been to a number of things which have not
yet made there way into these pages. Musically, many of the acts I had both
seen and written about before (e.g. Feast
of Fiddles, the
Jar Family, the
Ale Marys) but Eric Bibb was new to me. He was rather good as befits a
multi award winning artiste, although my abiding memory is actually of his
drummer who was simply excellent. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that he
had played in Nina Simone's band for many years.
In terms of theatre I think I mentioned
in passing a trip to see 'Journey's End', a fine play very well
performed. As a commentary on both the reality and the futility of the Great
War it is head and shoulders above the lame 'Birdsong' which
I saw a few weeks ago; but of course R.C. Sherriff was actually there. I also
saw 'If I Say Jump', an amusing and entertaining though completely unbelievable
piece about a vicar and a handgun. Speaking of the theatre I continue to
research Salomé in the hope of understanding why I
don't appear to like it. One fact that I gleaned from the opera programme is
that the original German premiere of Wilde's play was as a double bill with
'The Importance of Being Earnest'; a juxtaposition which even allowing for the
renowned cultural difference in sense of humour seems a tad odd.
Now to really scrape the barrel, I'm going to blog about the blog itself. The
lack of walking reports has been commented on, the implication apparently being
that I am a fair weather walker who is hiding from the cold and rain. That is
in a very real sense a fair cop, but, as it happens, on top of that I have a
problem with one of my toes; the big one on the right foot to be precise.
Although minor in itself it is precluding me from walking long distances.
Sadly, there will be a hiatus in the popular photographic series 'bridges
of the Yorkshire dales'; apologies for that.
When James passed a million hits on his blog he said that his biggest audiences came from the UK and the US
almost equally. This prompted me to look at mine and I find that apparently
more than half of all the hits (which I can confirm still fall significantly
short of a million) have come from France. Bonjour mes amis et bienvenus. While
I was at it I also checked on the search terms used to find the blog. 'Gay
porn' has sadly disappeared from the top ten, but a notable newcomer is
'fascinating stuff'; having read this far down it will be no surprise at all to
you that Google sent them straight here. The most frequent search term directed
to the blog is 'Epictetus', and one can only assume that there are an awful lot
of disappointed and bemused seekers after enlightenment out there.
