Empress Augusta Bay

 This blog has been ignoring wargaming recently, but wargaming has not been ignoring your bloggist. James has recently rediscovered the joys of blogging and has produced a summary of recent games in the legendary wargames room. I won't repeat anything except to concur that the last crusades game using To the Strongest! was a belter. For various good reasons we have been having shorter gaming evenings and the likelihood of winning flowed backwards and forwards over two evenings. The only slightly odd thing was that going into what turned out to be the final combat either side could have won a crushing victory depending on the result. That doesn't affect how good a game it was, but does make one question the victory conditions.

This week we turned to a naval game using the newish rules Nimitz. I only took one photo and that wasn't a very good one. The rules however are rather good: easy to pick up and very playable. The Japanese won a refight of the battle of Empress Augusta Bay, albeit one transposed to daytime. As with any first game of anything, I wouldn't repeat what I did with my forces a second time. The main moral I took from the game was that ships cannot really be used defensively. Having said that I also ended up thinking that charging straight at the enemy at full speed wasn't likely to achieve much either. Somewhere between the two lies the sweet spot perhaps. We are having another game next week so I shall have a chance to put my analysis into practice. After that it's a grand Peninsular campaign in which it seems I am to be in command of the British.

Clear as a bell

"And the sad act like lepers

They stick to the shadows

They long to ring bells of warning

To tell of their coming

So that the pure can shut their doors."

- Conor Oberst

One of our overseas readers has asked why it is that Morris dancers wear bells on their trousers. It is, of course, so that they can annoy blind people as well as everyone else.

BIF, the remainder

 I didn't actually take advantage of much else that was on offer at the Buxton Festival, choosing instead to take a trip to Hardwick Hall. I'd never been before, although I was vaguely aware of the story of Bess of Hardwick, who seems to have been a most formidable woman, marrying a series of rich men, who all died leaving her their money and property, fighting a series of lawsuits to maintain her rights in said money and property and outliving pretty much everyone who'd tried to get one over on her. It's an interesting house and an interesting story. What I hadn't realised previously was that her second husband was the Cavendish from whom the Dukes of Devonshire descend or that she had built the original Chatsworth House, now replaced by the current one. The 12th duke owns much of the land a bit further up the Wharfe Valley from where I live, as he does most of the land around Buxton. Both places are replete with pubs called the Devonshire Arms and buildings called the Cavendish Pavilion and the like. I would post some photos of Hardwick Hall, but it was raining heavily during my visit, as it continued to do throughout my few days in Derbyshire.

Now, far too little time has passed since I last featured Morris dancers and I apologise for mentioning them again. The worst of the rain was on Saturday morning and with thunder, hailstones etc all going on around me I dived into the small shopping centre in the centre of Buxton to be confronted by the surreal sight of dozens of Morris men and women standing there jingling to themselves. OK, not just to themselves, but also to the rest of us who were seeking shelter from the storm. It seems that someone thought it would be a good idea to have a constant stream of Morris sides dancing throughout the town during the festival. It wasn't. The vaguely steampunk bunch shown above were perhaps the least offensive.

A Morris dancer goes into a pub and says to the barman "I bet you don't remember me".

The barman studies him for a bit and says "Well, I don't recognise the face, but the legs ring a bell".

Sleepwalking

 And so to the opera. I have been out and about for the last week or so, including a brief trip to Glasgow, to which I may return in due course. But most of my time has been spent at the Buxton International Festival, specifically the opera part of it. 

The best thing I saw was an excellent production of Bellini's 'La sonnambula', which transcended the original sexist power set-up in a rather novel, and much appreciated by the audience, twist at the end. Set in a sixties staff canteen - more 'Made in Dagenham' than 'Dinnerladies' - the period details were finely judged; Lisa dropped more than her handkerchief following the arrival of the mysterious stranger. Both musically and dramatically it was very good indeed.

I was less taken with performances of Mozart's 'Il re pastore' and Handel's 'Orlando', although as I'm never likely to get the chance to see either again I am glad that I was able to on this occasion. The singing and playing was very good, but the operas are somewhat slight, especially dramatically. Alexander the Great appears in the Mozart piece and was played as Napoleon, which was amusing even if the characterisation was mainly displayed by him wearing his bicorne sideways. If neither of those pieces gave one the opportunity to be emotionally invested in what was going on on stage that was made up for in the musical 'The Land of Might-Have-Been', in which the story of Vera Brittain in the First World War was told accompanied by, mainly, the songs of Ivor Novello. I thought it all worked rather well, albeit being very reminiscent of many similarly toned plays I saw between 2014 and 2018 as the centenary of the war which didn't end all wars was commemorated. Still, I hope the story of the losses and sacrifices and futility of those years never ceases to have an impact on me, and it certainly did this time. 

I Name The Guilty Man

 There's a scandal in the UK - and I mean the UK - concerning a 'household name' of whom I for one was completely unaware until all this blew up. The question I always ask myself on occasions such as this is cui bono? Rupert Murdoch would benefit commercially from a weakened BBC; Rupert Murdoch is attacking the BBC. Quelle surprise! Of course I could be being unfair to him; maybe he is genuinely very strongly against powerful men having relationships with much younger women.

Fun fact: did you know that Samantha Fox - to take just one example - was only seventeen the first time that people employed by Rupert Murdoch took sexual images of her and printed them in a publication owned by him.

PotCXXIpouri - a bit of a belated return to the slight return

 My old mate Robb Johnson has turned up as a crossword clue in the August edition of Mojo magazine - fame indeed. I have also discovered that one of his songs is featured in the film about Jeremy Corbyn about which I wrote a couple of weeks ago. He is now proudly pointing out that he has now been censored by the BBC, the TUC and by Glastonbury. He is selling himself short, because he was once also censored by Disney. I think it was 1983 if memory serves me right. Let's hear from him:

I chose that one partly in anger at recent Israeli colonial violence in Jenin . But also partly in disgust at recent material emanating from part of the Labour Party attempting to blame anti-Zionists for growing anti-semitism. This is yet another step in the ongoing conspiracy to outlaw legitimate criticism of Israel's apartheid state. 

Corned Beef and Cabbage

 There's an interview in this morning's Guardian with Jennifer Grant, daughter of the actor Cary Grant. There is apparently to be a TV series based on his life and starring Jason 'Zhukov' Isaacs as the mature Grant. I can't see the resemblance myself, but what do I know? It's an interesting article - though obviously not interesting enough to make me want to watch the programme - and contains a fair bit of detail about the actor's early life in England. Ms Grant states that whilst her father re-invented himself in a very American way, he remained a Brit at heart. Her chosen evidence for this is a bit odd though. Others might have pointed, for example, to his playing for the Hollywood Cricket Club, but she chooses to highlight his apparent fondness for Corned Beef and Cabbage.

No doubt British readers are at this point saying to themselves both that they have never heard of Corned Beef and Cabbage and also that whatever is on that plate next to the cabbage it sure as hell isn't corned beef. If I might be allowed a short digression here, back in the day when I sold weapons of mass destruction for a living I regularly had to travel to California. I happened to be there one St Patrick's Day. The day started oddly when the apparently intelligent young lady who managed the finance function out there for me said that she assumed that this was a big event back in London. I looked at her and asked if she was aware that Ireland was an independent country and had been for a long time. She wasn't. I was then invited out to a bar where the draught beer had been turned green in celebration, an idea which I had naively assumed was a spoof when I had previously seen it in an episode of Cheers. Then, one of the senior managers said he had to leave because his wife was preparing Corned Beef and Cabbage specially. After he left I asked our general manager - a Scot by birth - what on earth the chap had been talking about. The explanation, which I shall repeat here despite having never bothered to check it subsequently, is that Bacon (*) and Cabbage was a traditional Irish dish in the nineteenth century, but emigrants to the US found it easier to get Salt Beef and so that, coupled with cabbage, became a traditional Irish-American dish. Sounds plausible.

Anyway, any US readers please note that Corned Beef and Cabbage is unknown throughout the British Isles, and British readers please note that when Americans refer to Corned Beef they are talking about something that has never been near the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, and is probably all the better for it.

* To confuse matters even more, that 'bacon' would almost certainly have been 'gammon'.

It was out

                    "For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
                     And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

                     And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
                     As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
                     To and fro" - Francis Thompson

I have come to realise that my readers prefer not to have to wait too long for my guidance on the burning issues of the day. Well I hear you people, I hear you. It was out. And the moral? If you don't want to be stumped then don't go walkabout. The other one wasn't out; one doesn't have to know very much about cricket to understand that the crucial feature of a catch is that the ball doesn't touch the ground. The ball touched the ground, ergo it wasn't a catch. 

Here are The Duckworth Lewis Method and 'The End of the Over':

Bob Kerslake

 I was very sorry to hear today of the death of Lord Kerslake, who was the former head of the civil service amongst many other things. I knew him forty years ago, and found him a very pleasant chap, although I'm not sure I'd have believed anyone who told me then that he was going to go on to have the career he did. 

I'm also not entirely sure that I believe that he was only a year older than me. Yet another indication of one's own mortality.