Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain - a huge, solid, black Readers Digest compendium that covers the UK region by region and around the year and full of wonderfully gruesome linocut illustrations. I still have it on my shelves and bring it out from time to time.

I noticed with great pleasure that Charlie Cooper used it as a reference in his recent TV show Myth Country.

I’m on holiday this week - so there’s that for a start - and then my wife, who has a long-term illness, is greatly improved recently and we were able to get out for the first real countryside walk that she’s been able to for well over a year, so we are both very happy about that.

She didn’t overdo it either, so it looks like we will be able to head out for at least another one or two this week.

If this justification is actually genuine, then that’s a good baby step in the right direction and only a year or two too late.

However, I’m guessing that they realise that the usual protests would be exponentially larger this year if Israel was there and don’t want to scare the others off by having that going on.

In the excitement of national pride

Read that as excrement at first. Then realised that it’s probably quite fitting.

Blackadder already did it back in the '80s. The Sense and Senility episode was taking the piss out the ‘heroic’ stance long before the Tories actually starting doing it seriously.

Bombastic? Pretentious? Braggart?

Most do return to the river in which they hatched but, as I understand it, between 5 - 20% disperse to other rivers, which seems to be what is happening here.

Without some dispersal salmon would never have spread from the single river in which they originally evolved.

In the grand scheme of things I don’t do ‘angry’ that much at all, but the two times when I am most likely to angry at all are commuting to work and then back again. Commuting to, because I will be fuming over the latest environment-destroying, genocidal nazi shit that has hit the news overnight and on the way back because I will be grumbling over whatever nonsense and stupidity has arrived on my desk during that day.

In both cases, I make a positive attempt to get it out of my system by the time I arrive at the end of the travel. I recall a study that concluded that a 16mins commute was optimal for that - which mine was exactly at the time.

I’d always suggest volunteering - be it wildlife conservation or staffing a charity shop or restoring vintage trains in a museum or whatever. Pick something that you have a little interest in and you will already have that in common with the other volunteers and, as a volunteer, you have no commitments and can walk away at any point.

I’m the older end of Gen X, and have never smoked. The major factor in starting is peer pressure and I didn’t have any peers around me at the critical time who did. My family didn’t either.

I seldom drink alcohol and then I have only ever enjoyed cider - not beer, wine or spirits. This is just a matter of the taste for me. I simply don’t like it.

As a kid, I had had grape juice and I had heard adults enthusing about wine as usual and I had a idea what it must taste like.

If you imagine a taste/mouthfeel spectrum with wine at one end and grape juice in the middle, what I imagined wine to taste like was pretty much at the opposite end of that spectrum to what it actually tastes like. I had one mouthful and had no desire for any more at all. I have obviously tried wine and the rest at various times since, but my opinion is basically the same.

With cider, I’ll seldom have more that a pint or two a month these days.

I don’t think that I had anything like this from cartoons, but I had read about ginger beer in various childhood books long before I actually encountered it in the flesh and also Turkish delight from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was also one that I didn’t encounter IRL until later.

Ginger beer turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - not a patch on elderflower pressé, for example - but Turkish delight lived up to that passage, and I have thought about the book pretty much every time I have tasted it over the decades since.

I am always a little surprised that people are so keen to ‘read’ the plays. People don’t seem to have a similar desire to read film scripts.

To me, the obvious thing to do would be to watch a performance. There are plenty available online and, depending on where you live, stage performances are not too hard to find.

Reading it without seeing a performance lacks about 90% of the impact, I’d say. Reading it AFTER you see a perfomance is another matter: then you can pull out the language and take a deeper dive, but see a performance first.

I was halfway through this and increasingly puzzled before I realised that you are NOT talking about the 1945 Hitchcock film.

From things that are current, I’d a toss-up between Shrinking and The Great North. I’d probably lean to the former, but my wife would go for the latter.

Otherwise, The Good Place would definitely be high on my list and quite possibly at the top.

I am not familiar with either culture, but I’d guess that he does.

and asked me out on a date again

Was this specifically described as a date? If so, I’d suggest that this is the way in to politely raise this. In fact even if it was ambiguous, it still is the way to do it: “Just so that we are both clear, although I enjoyed meeting you the other night, I don’t want to take things any further than these casual meetings.” or similar. I’m assuming that you did enjoy it - or you wouldn’t be considering another one.

You could restate that you will soon be moving (people can be incredibly selective about what they take in and what they don’t) if you want to - although you shouldn’t need to give a reason if you don’t want to.

Looks like it will be warm but with some rain, so I’m planning to spend a while reading in the gazebo while it is raining. There is definitely something enjoyable about being outside, but out of the rain and not having to do anything.

They will spread - but usually along the river catchment where they started. It would take a while for them to establish on other river systems.

However, due to the delays in legal releases, there are also quite a few illegal releases. That’s not always ideal, but is probably the quickest way that they are spreading just at the moment.

I always heard it as trombeleese, which I imagined to be some exotic musical instrument like this:

I’m just having my breakfast. Doing that on a sunny Swiss balcony overlooking a spectacular Alpine valley would suit me.

Brush from an electric motor. Looks to be a new-ish one.