More Wars

I'm not going to witter on about every crossword I manage to do (honest!) - that would either be too many posts or far too few.

However the 'Star Wars'-themed puzzle from Paul earlier in the week was good fun - if a little easy... (don't say that don't say that!)... once you got the theme.

Pubs Around Nunhead: 1

As you know, I was not that impressed by the reference to the Herne Tavern as a Nunhead boozer in the Guardian recently. Not that I have much against the pub - it just isn't in Nunhead. Or if it is, it's right on the edge. The boundaries of Nunhead are a little fuzzy.

Anyway, to put the record straight, here are a few local pubs I've never been into.
This is Skehans: This I think is a pub no longer:-
The Golden Anchor:-
The Swiss Tavern:-
The Telegraph at the Earl of Derby, apparently:-

Spain Tour 23: The Bitter End

Even as we were leaving Altamira, some of us felt troubled...
As we arrived at our last hotel of the holiday, just outside Santander, some of us began to feel very troubled....

it was what might in a less enlightened time have been called Spanish tummy. What a hospital nurse will call D&V. Three of us were laid low - oldest worst of all. Not fun.

Let's just draw a veil over the next day or two...

Here are some of the views from the hotel window:-
Wife did manage to get a little further, and saw this sculpture. ... and then we were in Santander, and on the ferry home. Farewell!

War is Peace

Just one of the (easier) answers to today's Brendan-authored themed cryptic. Which also included:
Bush
Blair
Whitewash
Dossier
etc. Along with quite sharply worded clues. Marvellous. Full answer at the Fifteensquared link below.

But Not in the South

So, Ian Carmichael has died, aged 89. I stopped to think of all the films I'd seen him in: a lot were comedies (Boulting Brothers) from the late 50s and early 60s. He was in one acknowledged masterpiece, I'm Alright Jack, with Peter Sellars, Terry-Thomas, Denis Price, Richard Attenborough, Margaret Rutherford... crikey! ...and the list goes on.

But although he had the lead in that film, it is successfully stolen away from him by - well almost everyone around him, but particularly Sellers. He was also in Lucky Jim, but miscast, I thought.

So I'd like instead to remember him in School for Scoundrels - the film based on Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship books.

So I've just had an enjoyable afternoon looking at excerpts of the film on YouTube. And yes, it is another one of those movies - a little like Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Mouse That Roared - that I can remember almost every scene and line from, although I have no specific memory of ever watching the whole thing through from beginning to end.

These two clips bookend Henry's ownership of the appalling 'Swiftmobile' - in the second he has had his Yeovil training.


Which lead me to look at the original books - dated and class-ridden, but still very entertaining.

A word of warning: There is a 2006 remake, which looks absolutely awful from the clips.

Poem of the Week

A Valediction Forbidden Mourning
John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
-Whose soul is sense-cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Spain Tour 22: Altamira

After leaving Orviedo, we drove along the coast road, took a short stop for an hour or two on the beach, and then arrived at the Altamira Museum. This is built close to the Altamira caves, celebrated for their cave paintings.

The Museum is very well done indeed. The main, permanent exhibition is well laid out and the explanations are sensibly done. Light and airy, and the cases are not cluttered. The Museum also has a complete mock-up of the caves, through which tours can be taken. This does give a sense of how amazing the real cave paintings are, and I suppose it does help to conserve the original. But there is still something about authenticity... which was a little missing.

All in all, a really impressive museum, and not too large.