I woke up in the middle of the night with a story/character idea fresh in my mind, and quickly jotted down what I could remember of it in a notebook. When I woke up again 3 or 4 hours later and checked my notes I realised my exciting idea was essentially Westworld. Why I didn’t recognise that in the early hours I don’t know. That isn’t to say I can’t do something with it, just that it ‘needs some work.’

Some of the afternoon was spent working out why the scanner software has disappeared from this laptop, then putting together documents for my 2019-2020 Tax self-assessment. I think this is the last year I’ll have to do self-assessment, for which I’m grateful to the higher beings of the tax pantheon.

Sundown, you’d better take care

I took a reasonable walk again tonight, though not the full distance I did earlier in the week. I stuck to the old railway line, a favourite route, mostly surrounded by trees and birds. Over the past couple of weeks down there I’ve seen goldfinch, greenfinch, bullfinch and chaffinch; great tits, long tailed tits and blue tits; a blackcap, loads of blackbirds, robins, corvids and pigeons and a dove. None of these are especially scarce or unusual, but it’s the profusion and ‘presence’ of them that I’m noticing.

It was drizzling while I walked and the air was full of the smells of damp bark, blossom, and distant fox. Lovely.

***

Music tonight from the great Nic Jones. 208 years ago, in May 1812, Napoleon was preparing to take the Grande Armée to conquer Russia, a campaign that began in June 1812 and ended in ignominy in December that year. 70 years later, Tchaikovsky famously commemorated the event, but the ballad makers were a lot quicker off the mark:

But in disguise and sad dismay
The Galic Chief to Paris fled,
Unmindful of the wretched men.
He’d onward to destruction led.
His num’rous army, once so gay,
In captive chains now long may pine,
And linger out a joyless life,
Within Siberia’s barren clime.

Another broadside was the basis for this by Nic Jones. One story is that Nic found a fragment of the song, built the rest around it, then added the tune; another is that he edited down the words of an original and took bits of various tunes to come up with the end product: