"When Shall We Three Meet Again?"

Yes, Yes, Quoting Shakespeare Again
If the Devil can recite scripture to his own ends, surely your humble scribe can yark on a bit about the Bark of Avon?
     I mention this ahead of the Large Hadron Collider, because I want to see if Facebook's default picture illustration is the LHC - 

Large.  Hadron-ish.  Collider-y.  

     - or three women with boxes on their head -

Erm.  Yes.  More like Macbox.

     Be that as it may, I bring up the witches from Macbeth for a reason: they live in Scotland, where sub-zero temperatures are pretty much the best one can hope for, yet that question about their next coffee-morning only specifies three weather conditions:  thunder, lightning or rain.
     Given the weather today in the lowlands of Greater Manchester, perhaps Bill should have added in another line:

"In thunder, lightning or in rain.

Or gigantic snow blizzards, again."

     I know you lot are bitter cynics who don't believe anything unless there's empirical evidence, so let me kick Art awake to illustrate the point:

Uphill

     Turn through 180 degrees - the compass measurement not the temperature you feckless lons! -

Downhill

     As I said yesterday, disgusting not destructive.  Three inches of the nasty wet white stuff* greeted your modest artisan as he left the Mansion today, slush that will take on a repellent grey-brown colouration more reminiscent of farm slurry than snow.  Then, unless the temperature does rise, it will be trampled flat by hordes of scurrying feet, compacted into ice, to the peril of elderly men of an uncertain stance and poor balance**.

Shakeshaft
I was going to add this to yesterday's post, except it had already hit 1,000 words and I don't expect you to commit too much time to reading what is, after all, inessential scrivel***.  Take it away Conrad the Bad!

"When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning or in rain?

Have I mocked this line before?

It touches upon a subject sore.

No!  Not witches casting spells, 

The haggish magic ne'erdowells.

I mean our English weather, Wet:

Soggy, boggy, and foggy, yet.

     I have a feeling I've skitted this verse before, and then spent a good ten minutes not finding any trace of it in old posts, so I may be wrong and merely wonderfully creative.  Or bad at searching.


Last Day Sober!
Maybe I ought to correct that to "last full day sober" as my self-imposed sobriety for April ends 6 p.m. Saturday, thank you for asking.
     "But Conrad!" I hear you ask, "Why bother to - oh ta, and a whisky chaser please."
    Because I can.  Also, Mister Liver appreciates the lighter workload, as does Mister Wallet, and Mister Waistline, too.

Conrad.  Old, grumpy and sober.
But mostly grumpy.

"The Grenadier Guards In The Great War"
Amidst the chaos of the day there are a few amusing anecdotes hidden in the text.  I have mentioned about the Grenadiers present in France not having grenades until well into 1915, whereupon they were blessed, or cursed, with an hideously dangerous collection of ordnance that probably earned their inventors the Iron Cross Second Class.
     Finally the Mills Bomb arrived by late 1915, an horrid little implement used by the hundreds of thousands by British troops, those being specially trained in their black art being known as "Grenadiers".

The terror of the battlefield.
(and the Grenadier Guards)

     This did not sit well with the Grenadier Guards.  O dear me no!  Colonel Streatfield protested in writing to the Guards Division Officer Commanding, Lord Cavan.  Major General Cavan took up the issue with vim and vigour, writing to the War Office to protest about the purloining of the Grenadier's good name.
     The War Office, in the formal language of the time, rudely snubbed Lord Cavan.  They weren't backing down on "Grenadiers".

"Heh-heh!  Back Down?  NEVER!"

     Neither, however, were the Grenadier Guards.  One suspects that the War Office, a collection of superannuated pen-pushing bureaucrats of limited intellect who stuck together because there's safety in numbers, didn't realise quite who they were taking on.
     Craftily, the Guards approached His Majesty King George, who quietly took up their case, as he was their official patron.  Then as now, the monarch rarely intervened in domestic matters, but when they did, everybody stood up and paid very very close attention.
     Outmanouvred, the War Office capitulated in May 1916 and ordered that men trained in the use of grenades were to be officially known as "Bombers".
     Sic transit tyrannus scribulus!

King George V.
The "V" being made with first finger and forefinger in the direction of the War Office ...

"Bleeding Edge" By Thomas Pynchon
Just to let you know that I've started to re-read this, and am making notes of the text where I don't recognise the strange South Canadian idiom or personalities.  We shall see what level this runs to, since this novel is 30 year closer to the present day than "Inherent Vice", thus possibly less culturally adrift.
     Then again perhaps not - TP has worked in a lot of detail about computer systems and forensic accountancy. 
     As The Doctor says, "Time will tell".  Yes, yes, I know it's a documentary reconstruction series, but I think the quote fits.

Weeding sedge.  Close enough.

And If You're Reading This -
- hello Beth and Alison!
     I have arrived - Beth officially described me as a Grumpy Old Man, which is a perfect recapitulation of the truth.  She asked what I'd be doing this weekend and of course BOOJUM! came centre stage, leading to the question of "What's in it?"
     I couldn't show her my notebook as Alison - sworn sentinel of the workplace - sat beside me, though I described some of the fixtures - insulting First Bus, The Metro and William Shakespeare.
     Imagine a sea of flotsam and jetsam of the imagination, bobbing randomly on a shoreline, with some of the mental detritus being washed up on shore with no pattern or reason, then picked up, juggled and put in a sack before being tipped out of a moving car, and that's pretty much BOOJUM! in a most flattering light.
     Or, as Sophie one put it in a single word: "Nonsense"

Lewis Carroll, who started it all, nursing his Pet Pot

Thank you and goodnight!


* Snow.  Not heated marshmallow.
** I.e. - me!
*** ACTUALLY IT'S NOT!  I was just testing you.