27 March

Awake for morning in the bowl of night has shot the sultanas turret nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

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Coffee. Porridge.

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What could cheer us up in times like these. More than the knowledge that Streets of London now has six verses, I mean?

Obviously a sixteen minute eulogy to J.F.K by the Almighty Bob Dylan.

Don't really mean it about Streets of London. Ralph McTell is a great singer songwriter. The one about the guy on one of the last of the tall sailing ships is one of my favorites. Steve Knightley once said that only two folk songs have ever had life-changing cross-over success: Streets of London and the First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. (One of many sad things about the Lockdown is that I won't get to hear Peggy Seeger live in Bristol next month.)  I have heard more than one band say things like "We are now going to play a song by Ralph McTell -- no, not that one!" or "I can't tell you who wrote this next song, because you'd say, oh, boo, Streets of London." Ralph is always engagingly upfront about how the song made his career -- "people ask me if I get bored with it but if you want to hear it then I want to carry on singing it". I remember walking up the hill to the Glastonbury Acoustic stage and hearing the entire audience belting out the chorus from the tent.

And actually the new verse is pretty good. ("Remember what you're seeing barely hides a human being.")

Did you know that "hands held loosely by his side" changed to "harmlessly by his side" due to a misprint in the original sheet music.

If I get another 5 Patreon followers I will try and review the Bob Dylan thing.

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"Short" review of Fugitive of the Judoon turned into full length essay which I will have to edit this afternoon; delaying the even more full length Tom Baker piece until next week, I shouldn't wonder.

SECRET: I am a really, really bad writer. I write the most banal sentences, say the same things twice, repeat myself, say the same things over again, and all my sentences are incredibly superficial. I am, however, a bloody good editor, and after two rewrites I often sound almost coherent. But one thing this doesn't make me is quick.

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But Father O'Leary if two people were definitely going to go for their day's exercise at some time anyway and they deliberate co-ordinate so that they will be both be in the park at the same time and stay at least six feet apart does that count as a gathering?

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Lunch. Low fat cheese and rolls.

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Some of the people who spent the early '80s saying that God had invented AIDS because she really really really didn't like homosexualists and condoms are going against her ineffable will are presumably still alive. Have they pronounced on the morality of rubber gloves yet?

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Boris Johnson and Prince Charles have the virus. I feel fine.

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A man goes to the doctor and says doctor I think there is something wrong with my hearing. Oh says the doctor, well could you try and describe the symptoms. Certainly says the man, Homer is a big fat guy and Marge has blue hair.

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Dinner. Mushroom omelette and bacon. L thinks it is probably acceptable to go and buy vegetables tomorrow provided I remain socially distanced from the other people in the shop. Most of the supermarkets seem to have put taped markings on the floor.

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they mutilated his body and they took out his brain

what more could they do they piled on the pain 

but his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at 

for the last fifty years they've been searching for that
on the last sabbath day of of eighteen hundred and seventy nine
which will me remembered for a very long time