2016 – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Child’s play

Sunday a.m., parent-organised rugby practice for small boys on a park pitch up the Lea Navigation, large man clutching and shouting at infant: “YOU ARE NOT CONTRIBUTING VALUE TO THE TEAM! GET INTO THE SCRUM!” Sunday p.m., background chitchat on a walk for early secondary private schoolgirls round the gentrified Hackney badlands: “She’s so procrastinating…

Mechanical musical instrument invented for the 1851 London Great Exhibition by Henry Mayhew

He also coined “flaxen Saxon.” With other absurdities.

Tweets for February 2016

Is the Cibber piper in the V&A a notorious plague-pit drunkard?

Featuring O du lieber Augustin, the Thomases Dekker and Middleton, Daniel Defoe and various disreputable beggars and foreigners.

Cibber's blind(?) piper (dog bottom left) in the V&A.

Organ grinders and monkey and marmot migration

Any proto-ecologists don’t seem to have cared very much.

The recto of the Anglicised business card.

Augmented poetry

Theodor Körner, Andreas Hofer’s Tod: The Death of Hofer, the Tyrolese Leader – translation in The Times: I like the plausible military detail.

Ah, but can it lift kilos?

Current legislation means our Amazon warehouse jobs are safe.

Putting a spoon in your champagne/cava/prosecco bottle is dumb

Just keep it in the fridge.

Cameron’s Pole-tax

When a deal’s not a deal, & a regrettably shy Moses – somehow I doubt the Nige & George show will ping it. Re desert peoples: What to do with the discovery that one can more or less understand the Yiddish of the Stamford Hill Jews? They say such boring things – not a word…

Brenda strikes back

“Don’t waste your time on obscure contemporary composers, John,” she said.