Things I have learned since turning fifty.
1. If you play the didgeridoo your mouth tastes of wood.
2. Champagne will take that taste away.
3. If you play a didgeridoo in the bathroom it sounds louder than it does in the dining room. But either room empties fairly quickly.
4. It's difficult to mow a wet lawn. (Actually I knew that already. I just hadn't ever done it.)
5. If you let ten children play football on a wet, recently mowed lawn it will turn into a cross between the Everglades and the Somme in about three minutes.
6. Champagne can comfort you in this time of trouble.
7. Billecart Salmon (non vintage) is nice champagne.
8. Billecart Salmon (non vintage) doesn't last long and is too expensive.
8. Because a heavy metal song won Eurovision the redoubtable bigot Anne Atkins has decided that Plato was right about tables. (Trust me on this one if you didn't hear Thought for the Day on Radio 4 yesterday. But for the doubters I'm prepared to explain. Apparently because it was so obviously a bad song (chez aforesaid AA) that means that there must be ideal forms somewhere. In her case this means heaven, and her subsequent extended reasoning runs that Lordi's 'Hard Rock Hallelujah' was so obviously a bad song that tables must exist in heaven in the way Plato posited. The conclusion to all this is that she (AA) is right about everything, because everybody else's opinions are similarly obviously bad. Ahh. We live in a relative world. Anne - get used to it.)
8. Anne Atkins should drink more champagne and have more friends who disagree with her on small matters.
9. I now look old in photographs, and have done so for years but I didn't notice.
10. Bouzoukis and didgeridoos get more, and more interesting, comments in a blog than children do.
Gosh.
Apparently I yet lack queen status. But the undoubted queen of the western blogosphere, both crowned and uncrowned, has outed me. Yes indeed, it is my birthday today. And quite a significant one too. My children have given me a digeridoo and I am pondering the significance of their choice. Perhaps they think I am under-stimulated by my collection of odd guitars. I did hire and play a bouzouki last week so maybe I have given them ideas without realising. I am considering learning to play their kind gift today and standing at the foot of the stairwell tomorrow droning and singing odd snatches of "Family Arise", a new song I will write today based loosely on Rolf Harris's seminal 1962 digeridoo workout of fairly similar name. Incidentally my spell checker has never heard of a digeridoo and wants to write 'degrade' instead. Hmmm.
I've been blogically silent recently, busy on all fronts and in occasionally severe back pain. I visited and survived the Oddbins Wine Fair last Saturday about which I could write at length - and might yet, if asked nicely. I have been to a marvellous party in the middle of the Chilterns somewhere for a friend's fiftieth. Sitting in a marquee quaffing and catching up with people I have not seen for twenty years was very pleasant. Being entertained by a small jazz band playing real instruments with no microchips or plastic bits in them was even nicer. Not that I like jazz much, it's just an entertainment value thing. These days I tire very quickly of watching people play their gramophones in front of me. If I want that I can sit on a bus and listen to people's mobile phones pumping out music I haven't chosen.
Carlisle United were promoted as Champions. (That means they won the league Zed, not that they are some kind of mushroom.) That achievement deserves a paragraph of its own. We were there, well once anyway.
So today I'm probably going to see the Winslow Homer exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and have something for supper. My champagne palette has been honed to razor sharpness by last Saturday's Oddbins slurpathon so I'll be giving Tesco's finest the most rigorous of critiques this evening, all the way to the last reluctant drop. I find in general that champagne, in common with most wines, does indeed improve as you go down the bottle. I expect this finding to be confirmed. And I'll let you know if it isn't.