Read It In Books:Keep The Aspidistra Flying.

"You can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it" - George Orwell 

Last month, on the Thames Path, some of us visited George Orwell's grave. Betwist Xmas and New Year this year I'm running a London by Foot walk based around Orwell and London locations pertinent to him. Without giving it too much thought, I decided to call the walk Keep The Aspidistra Flying because (1) it's set in London and (2) it sounds good.

The trouble is I'd not actually read Keep The Aspidistra Flying so I thought I ought to remedy that forthwith. Orwell's good so surely it would be a pleasure rather than a chore. That's what I thought. It turned out I was right. It was an immensely easy, and enjoyable, read and even, towards the end, quite an emotional one. If not in the way I'd expected.

Twenty-nine year old Gordon Comstock (a cipher for Orwell himself?) is struggling with money, his clothes are tatty with buttons missing, and he can barely afford cigarettes. The bookshop, McKechnie's,  he works in is quiet and full of second hand books nobody wants to read, let alone buy. Comstock seems filled with contempt for everything around him.

The books, the advertising hoardings, the customers at McKechnie's, the cinema ("why encourage the art that is destined to replace literature?"), and, with a passion, the "snooty young men from Cambridge". More than anything it seems, he has contempt for himself. He's not a man who takes pleasure on seeing his own reflection in a mirror. He'd written a book some years ago but it had sold very poorly. Which had only compounded his poverty and his love/hate relationship with money. A theme his mind endlessly returns to. He hates money but he needs it. He certainly hates other people having money.

He blamed money for the fact that Rosemary refused to convert their very close friendship into a romantic and physical relationship (despite his repeated attempts to browbeat her into it, and the fact that she is genuinely interested in him) and he blamed money for his inability to build a closer friendship with the charming, and rich, Ravelston, editor of something called Antichrist. Ravelston proved himself to be sympathetic to Comstock and well meaning although that could hardly be said for his girlfriend Hermione who considered the lower classes to be "absolutely disgusting".

Comstock shares his lodgings with roly-poly George Flaxman, a lascivious toilet accessory salesman temporarily estranged from his wife, and Lorenheim, a desperate loner full of tall tales of improbable seductions and equally unlikely cunning ruses. The time he, Comstock, spends there is either spent feeling sorry for himself or working on his epic poem London Pleasures. But he isn't really getting anywhere with the latter of those pursuits. 

Yet he perseveres. As if writing it could save him from poverty and social isolation. Night after night spent in his "lonely room" with its "womanless bed". Just dust, fag ash, and aspidistra leaves for company. He'd become interested in aspidistras after reading The Ragged Trouser Philanthropist. Aspidistras, for Gordon Comstock, should be on the coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There would be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.

Comstock had tried what passed for normality - feeling he owed it to his mother - but though he was perfectly competent at performing his job he was unhappy in his work and when his mother died he walked out of the company. Actual poverty didn't suit him as well as he thought so, after draining his poor sister Julia's money pot, he eventually took another well paid job at the New Albion Publicity Company which would breed in him his utter contempt for any form of advertising, "the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced". 

Although he did meet the "distinctly attractive but rather intimidating" (his words, she's actually incredibly generous and thoughtful as well as extremely fond of him) Rosemary there and, which satisfied him less, turned out to be rather good at "writing lies to tickle the money out of fools' pockets". But that wasn't the life that Gordon Comstock wanted. He wanted a job that would "keep his body without wholly buying his soul" and, on top of that, Comstock felt the world revolved around him. When things went badly, which to his mind they almost always did, he would fall into a vortex of despair. A very well articulated vortex of despair of course.

Comstock turns up to a party that's been cancelled, he receives a rejection letter from one of the periodicals he'd hoped would publish him, and, for the most part, he can't even afford to drown his sorrows. So Gordon Comstock walks the streets of London alone at night and imagines the future. It's not a pretty future. Gordon Comstock rarely seems to try to alter the course of his own destiny. Like so many before and after him.

At times, Gordon Comstock doesn't sound like the sort of person you'd want to be around. He imagines every life lived in London to be "meaningless and intolerable", he sees decay, desolation, and disintegration everywhere he looks. Future wars and suicides seem, to him, inevitable and unavoidable. To be fair, the book was written in 1936 so it wasn't a bad call.

The era it is set in (Lyons tea houses, Player's Weights cigarettes, threepenny-bits, 7p pints in pubs with sawdust on their floors) is long gone and some of the language hasn't aged well either. (the girl serving Comstock in the shop is a "little bitch", an Italian girl is a "tart" (that one's meant as a compliment), an effeminate man is a "Nancy", and an Indian man is a "curry-face") but, elsewhere, the minutiae of life is incredibly well observed. There's a crack in the ceiling above Gordon Comstock's bed that resembles a map of Australia, and there's a "strange listless feeling" on Sunday night "when people are more tired after a day of idleness than a day of work".

It's worth observing that Orwell himself, like Comstock, uses the book to take pot shots at some of his own favourite targets. Chief among them the middle classes of England who lack vitality and die of dingy but expensive diseases often in the overfilled mental hospitals of our benighted nation. "Pretentious and wretched public schools" come in to Orwell's/Comstock's cross hairs too. Unsurprisingly.

Equally unsurprisingly, Gordon Comstock's relentless negativity, selfishness, and stubborn nature result in his life slowly falling apart and inevitable spirals of despair and degradation starting to appear. Even when he, quite against type, comes into some money he squanders it in the most foolish, seedy, and pompous way imaginable. Yet, despite his faults - of which there are many, you find yourself hoping he'll pull himself out of the hole, hoping he'll stick with the writing, and hoping he can learn to treat Rosemary with the respect she deserves and even, just possibly, win her heart over. You'll have to read the book to find out if any of that happens or not and I'd recommend that, if you haven't already, you do just that.

It's a compelling, and addictive, read but, as the critic Cyril Connolly said at the time, it is a "savage and bitter book" that at times makes the reader feel as if they are "in a dentist's chair with the drill whirring". That said, Gordon Comstock's motivations are relatable. Like many an idealistic yet selfish young man, he rails against respectability (those aspidistras again) and worship of Mammon. He would rather "reign in hell than serve in heaven".

In some ways, he's like an overgrown manchild prototype for J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield (who appeared a decade and a half later). In more worrying ways he's sometimes like an early version of an incel ("she would never understand. No woman ever understands", women were "a bloody curse"), and, in ways that are far easier to empathise and identify with, simply a frustrated writer, a frustrated poet, a frustrated artist, and a frustrated person. Like so many before and after him. 

 

Stuck In The Middle With Woo.

In The Mighty Boosh's fictional occultist supermarket Shamansbury's you can buy jaguar tears, owl beaks, horns, and hooves. Everything you need to mix up a magical potion. Ordinary, regular, supermarkets (and pharmacies) don't in theory stock pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo and woo but often we're tricked into buying it by canny advertising and product placement.

How do we know when we're being sold this stuff and how can we avoid this? Last night's Snake Oil on the Shopping List:How Pseudoscience Ends Up In Your Shopping Cart with Dr Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander for Skeptics in the Pub - Online took a deep(ish) dive into the subject and offered some history and some, if not many, solutions.

De Wismeg-Kammerlander is an Austrian Studies Scholar, a Visiting Research Fellow at King's College London, and, perhaps most pertinently to last night's talk, a marketing executive. She was informed, articulate, engaging, and if her talk slightly exceeded its allotted forty five minute duration then that wasn't a problem. If anything, it could have gone on a bit longer (though, with a toilet break).

She started by taking a look at consumer culture itself. Who buys what and for what reason? People buy things not just out of necessity but to reflect their social values, their identities, and their status in society. They express needs and desires via the medium of gift giving and often the stories of our relationships, both personal and professional, can be told through what we buy for ourselves and what we gift others.

To underline this point, the doc presented us with images of two different people. A young, slim, and attractive man in a rather nice black suit and a young, attractive woman (us old farts are so rarely catered for in these infographics, I'm only a poster boy for high blood pressure these days, Omron's calender guy) in pink jeans and a bright green t-shirt. Next another screen populated with various consumer items and we were asked to guess which of the two people would buy which goods.

It was, of course, easy. The purple headphones, the 'whimsical' shower gel, and the brightly coloured Fjallraven Kanken backpack would look unusual in the shopping trolley of the GQ poster boy and the darkly packaged grooming products, black Bang & Olufsen headphones, and protein yoghurt didn't seem the sort of thing a girl dressed as if ready to present a show on CBeebies would buy. Incidentally, on the yoghurt front, there seems to be a trend in America of late for 'broghurt'. Yoghurt for men. Because, of course we all know, that yoghurt is inherently feminine. 

Getting into the gender issues would be a whole other blog but it's clear that consumer goods are marketed to people based on age, lifestyle, and, yes, gender. Prominent media theorist Wolfgang Ullrich has it that we like to buy goods that flatter us as their owners and support our attitudes. Not just cars and clothes but more everyday items like toothbrushes and shower gels. These all become 'identity goods'. Though looking at my slightly threadbare toothbrush I wonder what this says about my own identity!

Ullrich posits that modern design and marketing have elevated quotidian consumer goods to the level, almost, of high art. They unlock memories, transform identities, and offer us future perspectives. Which does, admittedly, sound pretty hi-falutin' but I think there's a kernel of truth in his theory. Something to work with.

Consumer culture is, I think, central to the lives of the vast majority of us and if this is the case then what role does 'snake oil', woo, pseudoscience, call it what you want, play and why? Individual reasons for purchasing bullshit goods may relate to personal circumstances. Those that are distressed or suffering are easily targeted. If you're looking for hope and there seems to be none anywhere else, you will clutch at what you're offered. That's perfectly understandable.

Often not just the potential customers but the actual sellers are ignorant as to what they're selling and how efficacious the product is as regards the claims its creators make for it. Again, that's understandable. People lead busy, stressful, lives and they don't always have time to research every single thing in great detail. It's easy to be taken in by a charismatic sales person or someone of enviable status. If somebody looks as if a product has served them well, then why wouldn't it serve you well? Some people build parasocial relationships with sales people, imagining them almost to be friends when they are, in fact, anything but.

But more importantly than these individual motivations and decisions, there are systemic reasons for how woo ends up on supermarket shelves and, perhaps, in your bathroom cabinet. Author of The Brand Gap, Marty Neumeier theorises that "a brand is not what you say it is. It's what they say it is". Brand identities are constructed around purpose, personality, perception, positioning, and promotion.

In Germany, there are two brands of cough mixture. Bronchicum is reasonably effective (as much as a cough mixture can be, coughs can't be cured but the sore throats can at least be mitigated against) while Monapax is essentially useless nonsense. But Monapax has almost directly copied Bronchicum's design right down to the font. They've changed the colour scheme. Perhaps to avoid legal action.

 

This is one small example of a much wider phenomenon called the 'halo effect' in which one product, or it could apply to people as well, seeks to bask in another product's good reputation and success. In the UK, we have Neal's Yard Remedies whose advertising is designed to either overtly or subliminally seduce us into being attracted to the product. Because hey, spoiler alert, that's what advertising does!

Neal's Yard Remedies' advertising features super modern Scandinavian looking furniture, nice neutral colours that don't strain the eye, buzz words - "organic", "gut", "natural" over and over, and lots of their products come in aesthetically pleasing little blue bottles. Often companies like this will use photos of young, blonde, attractive women in their promotional material and if they can get them to wear a lab coat and lab glasses all the better. Science is sexy and if you buy these supposedly scientific, but also natural - did we mention natural?, products you can be sexy too.

Fonts (back to them) are often enough on their own to convince of something's worth and efficiency (Weleda have long used the Waldorf font - seemingly undeterred that it comes from a wholly racist organisation, Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy movement) and where products are placed, and in which shops, is also a factor. If you were to see a products in Boots you would assume that it's reliable and trustworthy. If you were to see the same product in a shop that also sold healing crystals and dreamcatchers you would, I would hope, have serious doubts.

Given the time and inclination, we could all be more thorough when making purchases but life's not like that. We're often in a rush, we need something urgently, we've got a train to catch, kids to pick up from school, social appointments to keep. That's not to say more consumer literacy wouldn't be helpful. The ability to 'read' products and brands, to use critical thinking to help us make more informed decisions.

Dr Wismeg-Kallermander suggested we should ask some questions before we make a purchase of a product with scientific claims to its name. What does the design and language tell us about the product? Do I know enough about the manufacturer? And, I think this may be the most important one, who is selling this product and why?

I'm not 100% certain I'll take all of that advice with me going forward but it's still good to have and Dr Wismeg-Kallermander provided a really interesting and useful talk that veered off into some subjects (Plato, Red Bull, Manufactum, IKEA shark plushies, King Charles III, Coca-Cola, witchcraft, homeopathy, Colin the Caterpillar cakes, cowhorns stuffed with shit and buried according to moon cycles, and barcodes that give off negative energy which may result in demonic possession!) that I've not been able to shoehorn into this blog and for that I thank her as well as host Brian Eggo (from the Glasgow chapter of the Skeptics movement), and Skeptics in the Pub - Online for another fascinating evening spent in my own front room.

A Q&A touched on Unilever, Jaffa Cakes, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, The Lynx effect (it doesn't work, I can tell you from bitter personal experience), setting fire to Teslas (but only with the owner's permission), and the Advertising Standards Authority ("tenacious but toothless" according to Eggo), and the hopeful overthrow of capitalism in its entirety as well as an appearance by the doc's two pets dogs Cissy and Roxy but I'll leave you with one obscure factual titbit. 

A law has been passed in Chile in which the Pringles mascot, a heavily moustachioed cartoon man called Julius Pringles, has been banned and all tubes of Pringles now feature an empty space where his face once was. I'm not sure how effective that will be in stopping children wanting their parents to buy Pringles but maybe it'd be an idea if we had a law that banned false and mendacious scientific claims from the packaging of goods in the UK too. My "gut" feeling is it might be worth a try. Or maybe we should all just get down to our local branch of Shamansbury's and stock up on some owl beaks.

Theatre night:The Glass Menagerie.

"I didn't go to the moon. I went much further. For time is the longest distance between two places" - Tom Wingfield

"Let me take you to the movies. Can I take you to the show? Let me be yours ever truly. Can I make your garden grow?" - Houses Of The Holy, Led Zeppelin

1930s St Louis. The Wingfield family (mother Amanda, twenty something children Laura and Tom) are living in reduced circumstances and it's only the thought of the southern hospitality and the fact that they're not in Spain (at a time of the Spanish Civil War, at a time of Guernica) that's keeping them warm. 

Though warmth and comfort, in Tennessee Williams' 1944 memory play (the play, in fact, which invented that very genre) The Glass Menagerie, are very different things. A southern gothic odyssey that insidiously worms its way into your head and into your heart while at the same time never leaving the confines of the Wingfield's slightly dilapidated looking pile.

Amanda (Sharon Small) is protective of her grown up children since her husband - a 'charming' telephone worker who fell in love with "long distance" - walked out on her yet she's overbearing and domineering and can't help but criticise and admonish Tom and Laura for the admittedly poor life decisions they make. She harks back, almost constantly, to the old days when she had servants and multiple "gentleman callers". To Amanda, the past isn't a foreign country. It's home. It's the present that is alien.

Son Tom (Tom Varey), the unreliable narrator of the play, works joylessly in a shoe factory by day yet dreams of adventure and the wider world. Almost every night without exception he goes out to the movies - or so he says - and often returns slightly the worse for wear.

Sister Laura (Eva Morgan), for her part, hardly ever goes out. She's fallen out of education and fallen out of work and she stays at home listening to old phonographs and making small and delicate glass animals who 'live' on the shelves and sideboards of their home together in what Amanda calls "the glass menagerie".

Amanda, aware that Laura will not be proactive in her own life - she has crippling shyness as well as being partially physically crippled - arranges for a gentleman caller to visit the home and, hopefully, make an honest woman of Laura and when that man, Jim O'Connor (Jad Sayegh), arrives the play really starts to get moving. I was certainly moved.

Jim O'Connor (who rocks a canary yellow zoot suit like Jim Carrey in The Mask) is everything that Laura is not. He's confident, he's successful (or he's on his way to being so), and he's outgoing. Laura had confessed earlier in the play that he was the one man she'd ever had romantic feelings for but her shyness is so debilitating that when he arrives at the Wingfield house she can barely stand to be in the same room as him.

The interactions between Laura and Jim are the most tender in the entire play and I'd be lying if I didn't tell you I had to wipe my eyes dry a couple of times. When he accidentally breaks the horn off of her beloved glass unicorn and she gives it to him as a souvenir it is an act of genuine kindness. But as we know from life acts of genuine kindness are not always reciprocated.

Will it work out for Jim and Laura? Will Tom, in his threadbare suit, ever find the adventure he so desperately craves? Will Amanda ever escape her past and the ghost of her absent husband? The Glass Menagerie will not offer easy answers but it will offer relatable ones as it tackles the deathless themes of memory, time's passing, family, loneliness, and affairs of the heart while at the same time making very good use of the music of Andy Williams (Can't Get Used To Losing You), The Cure (Pictures Of You), and Shakespears Sister (you'll find out why if you go and see it). 

A bravura performance from all concerned in a wonderful adaptation by director Jay Miller of what to me feels like a timeless story. Props to for the Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick which is a great, and unexpected, space for theatre. This is its last production for a while but thankfully not ever. The Yard Theatre isn't closing down but rebuilding itself, this time double the size. Theatres can be rebuilt but hearts can break just as easily as a glass unicorn.

TADS #68:Balcombe to Haywards Heath (or Mr.Ouse).

Haywards Heath, Cuckfield, Balcombe, the Ardingly Reservoir, and the Ouse Valley Viaduct was all new terrain to. I must have passed through it on trains from London to Brighton dozens of time but I'd never got off and had a look around. On a glorious April Saturday two weeks ago (yes, this blogger has been more than a little tardy) I (and the TADS) finally remedied that - and I was bloody glad I did too. What a lovely area, what a lovely day, and what lovely people to spend that day with.

I'd taken the train from Honor Oak Park to West Croydon (West Croydon is a story in its own right) and walked to East Croydon before hopping on another train to Balcombe. Pam was running very early but on arrival in Balcombe I met with Roxanne and Clive and soon with Pam, Adam, Teresa, Shep, Tony, Alex, and Freddie the dog. Freddie would go on to do far more steps than the rest of us that day. That lad's got some energy.

I had some cheese on toast (I'd not been feeling well and was struggling to get food down - but the day was a real tonic) at the friendly Balcombe Tea Rooms and, once done, we zigzagged through the quaint village of Balcombe before coming off into some woods - involving a brief wrong turn that nobody was too upset about.

Balcombe is a small place with a population of less than 2,000 and its name means "Mining Place Camp", Bal meaning mining place and combe meaning camp or, possibly, valley. The village has a series of World War I murals by Neville Bulwer-Lytton (1879-1951) which was commissioned by Lady Gertrude Denman (1884-1954) and placed in the Victory Hall near the tea rooms but we didn't go to have a look. We probably should have done.

Balcombe was also the birthplace of Lieutenant Colonel Frank Bourne (1855-1945) who was the last survivor of the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879 (and later featured in the 1964 film Zulu). The actor Paul Scofield (Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, Zeffirelli's Hamlet, and many more) is buried in Balcombe's St Mary's churchyard. But perhaps best of all, in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the 1981 TV series), Arthur Dent's house is in Balcombe. Bloody Vogons.

At this point somebody asked me "where do go from here" and it was down to the lake, I fear. Except it's not a lake so much as it's a reservoir. It's bloody gorgeous. With the sun shining across the verdant valleys you could almost imagine yourself to be in Switzerland. Freddie imagined himself to be in some kind of holiday heaven as he jumped in the water and chased a ball around. The rest of us just kept walking for a few miles along the lovely lake.

Ardingly (pronounced lie, not lee as I thought - they say things funny down that way) Reservoir covers 184 acres (74.5 hectares) and feeds the Ouse, a river which flows thirty five miles from Lower Beeding to the coast at Newhaven. It was created in 1979 by damning an Ouse tributary, Shell Brook and you can kayak, wind surf, paddleboard, dinghy, and powerboat on the water. Though you'll have to share it with carp, pike, tench, gudgeon, eel, bream, rudd, roach, European perch, and, if you're lucky, one very excitable young hound.

As we finally came off the reservoir there was a bit of confusion as the path split into multiple paths but we found the correct one soon enough and soon, via a pleasant field or two, we crossed Haywards Heath Road as the beautiful Ouse Valley Viaduct came into sight. We were far from the only ones who'd come to see it and many were, quite understandably, making the most of the excellent photo opportunities it provides.

Including us, although one numpty (me) clearly didn't get the memo about the pose required. The viaduct, described as "probably the most elegant viaduct in Britain", was built in 1842 by John Urpeth Rastrick (1780-1856, primarily a steam locomotive builder, he built the Stourbridge Lion - America's first ever locomotive) and David Mocatta (1806-1882, a Jewish architect who built synagogues as well as the train stations of Brighton, Croydon, and Haywards Heath - though the latter has since been rebuilt).

Sadly departing the viaduct we followed some more fields before arriving on the unpaved, initially, B2036/London Road which we followed for a couple of miles. The plan was to dip back into more rural paths but realising the two big highlights (viaduct and reservoir) had already passed and that that route would add too many miles/too much time, I made an executive - if uncertain - decision to continue along the now paved road into Cuckfield. Which is, I learned a couple of days before the walk, pronounced Cookfield and not as you might expect it to be pronounced.

It was only another mile or so and Cuckfield's not huge. People were needing a drink, a sit down, and possibly more than anything, the toilet so we made our way to The Rose and Crown pub. All of the outdoor seating was taken but we enjoyed a couple of pints inside and were even joined by the always engaging, always funny, Dan Whaley who told a great story about a Taj Mahal gig as Shep and I reminisced over the hugely fascinating subject of phone numbers.

Cuckfield (population, approximately 3,300) is twinned with Aumale in Normandy and Karlstadt in Bavaria and the debated origin of its name is generally associated with the cuckoo which is the village emblem. A market town and coaching stop between London and Brighton, landowners protested the possible arrival of the railway and were successful. The railway instead went to Haywards Heath and then that town took over prominence between the two neighbours.

Very near neighbours as it turned out. The final stretch only took about an hour. Through some fields, sadly not down Mytten Twitten, and past some lovely suburban houses on the edge of Haywards Heath as Alex regaled us with stories of her time going to school in the area. Her school even featured in the walk but I missed her telling people that at the time. Like a complete doofus.

In 1822, near Cuckfield, Mary Ann Mantell found the first known iguanadon fossils and other Cuckfield notables include Natasha Bedingfield, Tara Fitzgerald, Baron Denning, Sally Geeson from Bless This House, Nick Van Eede of Cutting Crew, Jamie Theakston, Mike Hazlewood (who co-wrote The Hollies' The Air That I Breathe so does rather well out of Radiohead - or would do if he didn't die in 2001), and the actors James and Edward Fox.

Haywards Heath's name was first recorded in 1261 as Hayworth (then in 1359 as Hayworthe, 1544 - Haywards Hoth, 1607 - Hayworths Hethe) and legend has it that there was once a local highwayman called Jack Hayward who it's named after. Roughly 34,000 people call it home and in 1642, HH's Muster Green saw a minor battle in the First English Civil War. Only a few hundred died as the Parliamentarians emerged victorious. It was once home to the UK's largest cattle market (make your own jokes about the town's women, I'm not going there) but that's now a Sainsbury's and in 1859 the opening of the Sussex County Lunatic Asylum was a major event in the town.

It's twinned with Bondues in France and Traunstein in Germany and notables are listed as Daniel Bedingfield, Natasha Bedingfield (Cuckfield or Haywards Heath?, make your mind up Nat), Milan born Greta Scacchi, Wycombe Wanderers midfielder Kieran Sadlier, Richard Osman and his brother Matt's and Matt's Suede bandmate Brett Anderson. Which led us to sit in the beer garden of the Burrell Arms and talk about our favourite Suede songs - as well as burial plans and jokes about ambushing a group of Capital Walkers who we met in the pub and had done a much longer walk than us. I laughed hard. Roxanne and Clive had left before the pub and after the pub Tony, Alex, and Frederico left as well.

The rest of us retired to The Curry Inn for nice Indian food and some more silly chat before Pam and I got some train booze and returned home via East Croydon,. We're doing it all again in a couple of weeks (Walking with Ghosts, Guildford to Horsley) so all I can do now is thank Pam for the photos (less than normal as I didn't take any this time), apologise for this blog's tardiness, and say a very big thankyou to Roxanne, Clive, Shep, Pam, Adam, Teresa, Dan, Tony, Alex, and, of course, Freddie for a really wonderful day and a lot of laughter. Long live the TADS!