Pole Position!

Kapow From Krakow
That's good, isn't it?  Or at least not bad.  Although it does only work with the English pronunciation, which is "-ow" instead of "-off".
     Okay, Slavic pronunciation lesson over, let's get with the illustration of my painful title today.  

Hello Poland!

Rzeczpospolita Polska if you want to be precise about it.  Look at all those nice ladies and gentlemen who now know what life in the UK is like, or at least what goes on in the head of your humble scribe.  The two are not mutually exclusive, after all.

Boczek
This is the Polish for "Bacon", and is what Conrad got in his shopping of Wednesday, and allow me to recycle an older photo.

The boczek balanced above the gherkins

     Now, Conrad is no expert on boczek so when he sliced it apart he found a couple of immensely hard globules in it, reminiscent of bits of bone.  Were they supposed to be there?  Was Anglo-Polish trade imperilled by sabotaged bacon?  Did sinister Slav vendors of smoked pigmeat intend for Conrad to break his teeth?
     All very paranoid.  And wrong!  Conrad enquired of Pete, whose fiancee is Polish, and was informed that it needs to be baked.
     Right.  Better get that oven fired up.

Made Up Of Awww!
As you know Conrad is a flinty-hearted swine, made up of neutronium and bile for the most part, leavened with a little fuming nitric acid and Scotch Bonnet Peppers.
     However, he does unbend a bit every so often, and is mightily impressed with the following:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDG2cwsndhk

This is Teddy Bear, the somewhat-confusingly named porcupine.  If you think of porpcupines as simply a set of arrows attached to a badger, then this will surprise you, as Teddy Bear practically speaks Human.  Very appealing.

Teddy Bear: squeaking, squawking, eating and talking.

Have You Heard? Bird Is The Word
Quite what that particular word means is still up for debate.  Anyway, were the birds a-chirping in the treetops this morning?  Hopping excitedly from branch to branch, exchanging gossip and banter in passing?
     Who knows.  I certainly don't as I was quite happy to lie there in bed until 10:30 a.m., having set my alarm for 8:30 so I could ignore it.  But you can picture the scene ...

BLACKBIRD:  GOOD Morning!
THRUSH: Good MORNING!
BB:  I fear we must make our own entertainment this morning.
T:  Yes, I notice Fatty's not here.  Is he working late?
BB: He's not working at all.
T:  Ha!  How can they tell the difference?
BB:  Oh, not bad, not bad.
T: I suppose if he's face-down on the keyboard, snoring - 
BB: - too much gin and vermouth the night before!
STARLING: Crikey - him again!  I were looking in the bathroom window -

 - the bus didn't come due to it being Saturday morning but good taste prevails.

The Days Pass By
But of course they do, otherwise we'd be stuck in the Present and we'd never reach the Future and the Past would stay the same, absolutely and comparatively.
     Being a bit more focussed and down-to-earth, the passage of days means that my diary is running out.

     This is the culprit.  Conrad, being of peculiar and probably unsound mind, had not noticed until yesterday and now has a single day to resolve matters.
     Conrad - a dab hand with the Browning M2 Heavy Machine Gun, graduated from the Sorbonne and with ten years staff experience at Downing Street - yet unable to realise that a diary expires after 365 days.

Sherlock
Conrad is not going to detail the whole programme that ran last night, as it was 90 minutes long.  I did take notes, quite a few, and noticed that Steven Moffat has his fingers in this as well as Doctor Who, in addition to Mark Gatiss, who is also wont to stick his nose into Doctor Who as well.  BBC networking, eh?
     It was all very puzzling.  It started in the present, then went back to 1895 for a long time, then back to the present, then back to 1895, then the present, then the Reichenbach falls, then the present then 1895.

Conrad: puzzled.
Perhaps a bit ominous, too.

     One might say it was very meta, in that sense.  Still very confusing.  It starts with a suicide, except it's not, and it's not clear if it was real or not.  There are several murders, which are excused away by us being told what utter swines the victims were, although given that this is after the event by a bunch of murderous conspirators, one feels a lack of conviction.  
     There was some amusing stuff in passing - Mrs Hudson complaining about her being a literary device, Mary Watson and her domestic staff also complaining.  The Doctor mistaking "Paranoia" for a Serbian secret society.  Oh, and Moriarty getting kicked off the Falls with a despairing shriek.


Now, SPOILERS!







Let there be no mistakes, SPOILERS!!





Sorry.


It was all explained away as a monstrous conspiracy of women in order to - er - to get really important things - like - er - a credit in The Strand magazine?  Shorter working hours?  Better quality cream cakes?
     I think the hint was that it was to earn the vote for women.  Given that this didn't happen until after the First Unpleasantness (and partly because of it), a delay of 23 years, one can dismiss this conspiracy as being as effectively run as First Bus.