(Done in haste, in order to catch up from yesterday.)

Deeper And Deeper. (from Erotica)

The third track in a row on this album which, rhythmically, sounds like it might turn into Vogue at any minute. Maybe that's just me, though.

Oh! Bloody hell! She's actually singing Vogue now! I'd forgotten she did that!

Delicious stuff. Didn't Clivilles & Cole do the excellent remixes for this?

Don't Stop. (from Bedtime Stories)

Thin but appealing, like so many of us.

Candy Perfume Girl. (from Ray Of Light)

Oh, this does drag on. I can't be arsed with it at all right now. It's Friday afternoon, for crying out loud! I want Disco Madonna back!

I Deserve It. (from Music)

Instead of which, we get Heartfelt Sincere Madonna - possibly for the first time ever, with this patently genuine ode of love to "this guy" (oh yes, very clever). I have always found this song immensely touching - there's an unadorned simplicity about it, which might not have worked if the emotion hadn't been so palpably real.

Love Profusion. (from American Life)

Why was I having so much difficulty getting to grips with this album last week? Maybe it's the one-track-at-a-time approach which is helping to win me over at last. But why did I think it was so uniformly cold, sterile, hostile, dry? This track at least has a warm, beating heart to it - and hooray, it's a toe-tapper to boot. Weekend Bank holiday, here we come!

5 points: Deeper And Deeper
4 points: I Deserve It
3 points: Love Profusion
2 points: Don't Stop
1 points: Candy Perfume Girl

Mike: 13 13 12 12 10

All: 15 13 13 11 10

Jump to next part.

Labels: whichmadonna

(Dedicated to Stuart of Kitchentable, who often blogs about this sort of caper.)

1. So, I only went along to Hard House Night Dahn NG1 because Ian M was playing...because he was always my favourite DJ at Trade...and we occasionally used to pass the time of day together, in the upstairs coffee bar, after his set...and, not having heard him play out since God knows when, I suddenly felt like paying my respects to my past...and anyway, I wondered what it might be like to dance the Hard House on beer. Because I might have done most things in my time, but I never actually got round to dancing the Hard House on beer.

2. Actually, I wondered what it might be like to dance the Hard House, period. Because it's been a long time, been a long time, carry me back, carry me back...

3. However, the sound system at Turnmills and the sound system at NG1 are two very different creatures. For music as crushingly, simplistically brutal as this to work at all, you actually need an absolutely pristine, crystal clear sound system. None of your distorted rock and roll fuzz here, thank you. Every synthesised hard-hat tish counts. In large amounts.

4. So it just sounded like everyone says it sounds like. doomph doomph doomph doomph doomph doomph doomph oompoom, da capo al brainmelt.

5. Then Buni and I got stuck behind this boggle-eyed loon who did that kind of semi-crouching wiggle where you stick your bottom right out, except he kept shimmying backwards and crashing into us the whole f***ing time, no matter where we put ourselves. We decided he needed to come with a taped warning message. "This vehicle is REVERSING!" Flashing red lights on his arse would have helped, as well. Oh, and then he nicked my pint.

6. And then some other boggle-eyed loon lurched into me from behind, while I was just starting my next pint, and sloshed it all down my shirt front.

7. And then I bought two more, and went to the toilet, and when I came back one of them had been sent flying. God just didn't want me to drink beer last night. You'd think He was trying to get me to do Other Stuff instead. But no - I'm a born again beer boy now, with the belly to prove it. Still, The Guardian says that's the new sexy gay look, so that's all right then. I've always been achingly zeigeist, you know.

8. And then someone trod on my toe. Hard. I was getting a bit fed up by then. Can you tell?

9. And Ian M didn't even bloody show up! Not that anybody seemed to notice. Tsk, youngsters. So weird, dancing to Trade music while surrounded by normal, healthy looking Young People with their tops on.

10. Still, the most attractive man in the club kept looking at me. Unfortunately, he was also clearly several astral planes removed from the rest of us - he was looking at everyone. He'd dance for two minutes, charge off the floor, wander round a bit, charge back on again in a completely different place, dance for two more minutes, and so on, and so on. Memory of a goldfish. Also, he couldn't decide whether to keep his specs on, or to tuck them into his cleavage. On - off - on - off. (I thought On looked better, myself.)

11. (Oops.) I discovered that you can dance the Hard House on beer, provided you have an awful lot of it - at which point the music suddenly starts sounding nice and crunchy and punky and rock and roll, and the overall mushiness of the sound becomes quite appealing, and you can start lurching about to it quite cheerfully, without that nagging "why am I even doing this?" feeling. So now I know. Good. Shan't be doing it again.

I was thinking of coveting my neighbour's ass.

Oops, missed a day. Too busy with all that Installation Art (see below). What, you thought I just casually knocked that stuff out in five minutes flat? How little you understand the creative process.

I shall therefore try and make amends by doing two sets of Madonna tracks today. If I can.

By the way: a small number of you seem to be voting along each day. Which is cool. And to be encouraged, I think. If it continues, then I'll start tallying up collective totals. Because, you know, I'm inclusive like that. Got to keep fostering that sense of contact!

Bye Bye Baby. (from Erotica)

One of Madonna's slighter pleasures, I think it's fair to say. I have also developed a strong aversion to songs with "bye bye baby bye bye", or versions thereof, in their choruses. Too much prolonged exposure to Eurovision, you see - there's usually at least one every year. Or at least it feels that way. Still, at least she confines her rhyming to "your turn to cry", rather than adding the statutory "why why baby why why?". It's touches like this which make her a Great Artist.

Incurs penalty points for trotting out that tired old "yeah! wooh!" sample from Lyn Collins' Think, which we'd all got sick to death of four years earlier.

I'd Rather Be Your Lover. (from Bedtime Stories)

This slips by pleasantly but unmemorably, until the fantastic Me'Shell NdegéOcello shows up halfway through with a guest rap (she was signed to Madonna's Maverick label at the time, so a little cross-promotion was clearly in order). After her departure, the track reverts to tuneful-but-dullish type. Left with a sense of post-Me'Shell elevation, one does then feel more charitably towards it, however.

A much better sample, as well: Lou Donaldson's Blue Note jazz cover of the Isley Brothers' It's Your Thing, which I possess in its original format on one of those endless cheapo Blue Note compilation jobbies that show up in everyone's collections sooner or later.

Me'Shell NdegéOcello, though! God, she should have been a star. Ever heard her 1996 album Peace Beyond Passion? Oh, it's just marvellous.

Ray Of Light. (from Ray Of Light)

You don't need me to tell you what a classic this is, do you? No, thought not. Absolutely one of the very best things Madonna has ever done, ever ever ever ever ever. All further words are quite superfluous.

Runaway Lover. (from Music)

If I were the DJ at the Madonna Fan Club Convention Disco, then I would be well advised to follow Ray Of Light with this toe-tappin' choon - one of the two remaining Madonna/William Orbit collaborations on this Mirwais-dominated album (unless you also count American Pie, but we'll get to that later). Not much of a song - but, y'know, lovely textures and all that. We are rather suffering from Third Track Substance Deficiency, though.

I'm So Stupid. (from American Life)

But not any more. Bring on the Substance! Jeez, could she make this any more direct? The aural equivalent of Madonna (in her Patty Hearst/Wolfie Smith garb, natch) reaching out, grabbing you by the throat, maintaining direct, unblinking eye contact from an inch away, and telling you exactly how she feels about the way she used to live. The self-criticism on Ray Of Light seems so oblique, so soft, when compared to this. She was stupid, OK? Got that? Got that? The only one of these five tracks which completely held all my attention from start to finish.

5 points: Ray Of Light
4 points: I'm So Stupid
3 points: Runaway Lover
2 points: I'd Rather Be Your Lover
1 points: Bye Bye Baby

11 11 9 9 5

Jump to next part.

Labels: whichmadonna

My submission to Gert's Installation Art Thursday was exclusively premiered earlier today, in a comments box at Rise.
As it's a touring installation, I am now installing it here.
Thank you. That will be £350,000 please.
And now, may I present the world premiere of its companion piece...

Remove Power, And We Have Nothing.




(Click on any image to enlarge.)

Another £350,000, please.
Or - tell you what - six hundred grand the lot. Can't say fairer than that. No, I'm an artist - I don't haggle.

...then Hello! Apparently this site fosters a sense of contact with the author rarely seen elsewhere, so...um...Hello! again. And leave me a comment, why don't you?

(Don't be scared: leaving an e-mail address isn't mandatory, and I don't bite. Well, not in such a way as would leave a mark. Oh yeah: cheap innuendo. We have that, as well. But not in Norton-strength quantities, you'll be relieved to know.)

I also hope you like Madonna, as that's the current daily wheeze round here: a track-by-track analysis of her last five albums, to establish which is the Best! Madonna! Album! EVAH! Apart from the ones she released in the 1980s! You can even vote along too, if you so wish.

Alternatively, you might like to create some Installation Art, and then tell this blogger about it. We're all going through something of a collaborative creative phase round here. Such larks!

(Oof - I suddenly feel like a Kindergarten supervisor welcoming a new child to the Activity Table.)

Or then again, why not browse through the amazing range of postings that were made during Guest Week? Here's the introduction, here are days 1 to 6, and here's day 7.

You can also access my selection of Troubled Diva's Greatest Hits on the sidebar to the right, under the we wrote, we saw, we played and we serialise sections. Or for soundbite-sized reviews of my currently most-played albums, hover your mouse over the entries in the we listen section.

May your stay here be a fragrant one. Do come again.

Weblogs as Creative Arts Workshops, part 94.
(Ooh, there's a dissertation-in-the-making here for some bright spark...)

We started gently, with haikus and limericks. Growing in confidence, we then moved on to iambic pentameters and Clerihews. Yesterday was Performance Art day...and today, as requested by Gert, is...

::: installation art thursday :::

Here's a brief definition of the genre, and here's a longer article about it.

Examples? Martin Creed's award-winning installation, which consisted of an empty room with the lights going on and off. Tracy Emin's tent, containing the names of all the people she had ever slept with. Richard Wilson's 20:50 - a room filled with sump oil. Anthony Gormley's Field For The British Isles - a room full of tiny clay figures. Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag. Mona Hatoum's little room containing a video of her endoscopy.

Think site-specific. Think disposable. Think "found objects". Think repetition. Think lengthy, wildly pretentious titles, à la Damian Hirst. Think dead simple ideas imbued with grand meanings - because you're the artist, and you say so, and get me Charles Saatchi on the phone NOW. Think "Yes, anyone could have done that - but I was the one who actually did it, so Yah! to you, and all enquiries via Jay Jopling, please."

Be bold. Be brave. Be foolish. Above all, be ART.
(And when you've been all that, tell Gert.)

See you at next year's Turner Prize...

Fever. (from Erotica)

From killer (the opening title track) to filler, you say? Another pale re-tread/crass reduction of a recent smash hit, you say? And who needs to hear yet another cover version of Peggy Lee's over-played classic, anyway? Well, although I see where you're coming from (and one does indeed spend the entire duration of the track half-waiting for it to lurch completely over into Vogue), I think you're being unfair. It's an obvious give-the-punters-what-they-want crowd-pleaser, but it still shimmers and sashays along quite delightfully, if inconsequentially. Besides, I like a bit of Inconsequential Disco Fluff Madonna from time to time. I'm only sorry that she doesn't come out to play anymore.

Secret. (from Bedtime Stories)

It didn't all start with Don't Tell Me, you know: this serves as a timely reminder that there has always been a Softly Strummed Acoustic Guitar Element to Madonna's music. Simple falling-in-love sentiments, expressed in a repeated four-chord descending progression that could have descended from heaven. I could listen to that progression all afternoon. Aah.

Swim. (from Ray Of Light)

Aha. Eight tracks into our Project, and we hit our first comparative dud. Ponderous, half-baked, cod-spiritual, pseudo-meaningful twaddle about sin and redemption, with Madge detailing some of the wickednesses of our sorry world (at least, the ones where teachers rhyme with preachers) and hinting at something of a nascent Messiah complex into the bargain. ("I can't carry these sins on my back, don't wanna carry anymore.") My, but this drags. And hold up, isn't that a New Age Flute creeping into the mix? Irredeemable.

Impressive Instant. (from Music)

...whereas Impressive Instant, despite some equally barmy pseudo-cosmic lyrics, redeems itself by virtue of being about absolutely nothing at all. Mutant phreekazoid disco par excellence, with Madge's voice all chopped up, vocoderised and put back together again. Great effect. If only Mirwais could have been persuaded to put the vocoder back in the box afterwards.

Hollywood. (from American Life)

In which, having largely de-camped from London back to L.A. last year, Madonna wastes no time in sticking the boot into the place. This is no straightforward diatribe, mind - you can feel the lure of the place tugging her back, even as she attempts to trash it. ("I tried to leave it but I never could.") Recognising Hollywood as a place whose vacuous yet heady delights can ultimately render you neutered ("I lost my reputation, bad and good" - now ain't that the truth?), even Madonna's voice ends up neutered by the end of the track, electronically treated so that it gradually slips into an alarmingly realistic male register. Bewildering, contradictory and altogether very strange.

5 points: Secret
4 points: Hollywood
3 points: Impressive Instant
2 points: Fever
1 points: Swim

9 6 6 5 4

Jump to next part.

Labels: whichmadonna

How strange. Having got myself in quite a righteous stew last night, after once again considering the relative amounts of media coverage devoted to the tiny number of SARS casualties versus the largely preventable and quite unnecessary African casualties of AIDS and malaria (particularly after viewing this arresting visual comparison), I then proceeded to have a succession of vivid nightmares about SARS becoming a terrifying global epidemic. I shall never quite understand my sub-conscious.

Anyhow. I successfully (if only temporarily) managed to de-stew myself last night with the aid of two more terrific music sites...

1. In the process of answering a "name that tune" query from thebrick, I discovered tunes.co.uk - a dance music retail site with vast numbers of high-quality, full length RealPlayer files of the goods on offer. No lowest common denominator trancey bollocks here, either: the site specialises in a healthy selection of excellent small labels, such as Tummy Touch, G-Stone and Ninja Tune.

Here are some recommendations. The very fresh and frisky Peace by Tutto Matto is the tune which led me to the site in the first place. Or how about sampling some of Danny Krivit's orginal rare disco edits? Or - possibly best of all - click on The Tunes Jukebox from the front page, and scroll through some of the newest additions to the site. (I particularly liked the track from the Quantic Soul Orchestra.) Good job that RealPlayer is blocked at work, or else I might have lost a day.

2. Via Jockohomo, I discovered the astonishing April Winchell: Multimedia. This is a vast directory of very strange MP3s - from 1950s public information clips about the twilight world of the "homophile", through to Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and the Supremes singing German language cover versions of their 60s hits, via some scary (and hilarious) vintage Christian propaganda (please tell me you'll listen to Premature Ejaculation), and even taking in those old friends of the Troubled Diva Old Curiosity Box, Salma & Sabina (the Abba In Hindi sisters). The MP3s are low-res, but at least this keeps the download times short - and besides, with a selection like this, who's complaining?

Today is Official Performance Art Day in the Blogosphere, and this is my contribution.

audblog audio post

N.B. This is, therefore, my Performance Art Voice. Normal speech patterns may differ.

-oOo-
Update: More audblogs! They're all the rage! Add yours!
(But only if they're Performance Art, please.)

1. Mike of Carpe Mañana. (the first one I listened to, yesterday evening)
2. Caroline of Prolific.
3. Junio of You Say Tomato.
4. Meg of not.so.soft.
5. Vaughan of Wherever You Are.
6. D of Acerbia.
7. Anna of little.red.boat.
8. Aquarion of Aquarionics.
9. Cathy of Bent Back Tulips.
10. David of Swish Cottage.
11. Peter of Naked Blog.

Please also note that your Performance Art contribution doesn't have to be an Audblog. And if you do decide to participate, then remember to tell Vaughan.

OK, so let's work our way through the last five Madonna albums, track by track, and settle this burning question once and for all. (Obviously, I'm going no further back than Erotica, as Like A Prayer would have walked the entire contest. Also, I don't have any of the earlier albums on CD. Also, listening to 55 Madonna tracks in close succession is a big enough undertaking as it is.)

Erotica. (from Erotica)

At the time of its release - with Madonna still riding high on the massed critical consensus generated by Like A Prayer, the Blonde Ambition tour, The Immaculate Collection greatest hits set and the stunning videos for Vogue and Justify My Love, the Erotica single felt like a let-down. We thought she was an Artist! We thought she could "do" any theme she liked, and then move on swiftly to the next incarnation! We thought she'd already done the pervy shag-mistress bit with Justify My Love! This felt like a re-tread; a crass reduction of Justify My Love in both musical style and lyrical subject-matter. Stop droning on about sex the whole time, woman!, we cried.

However: thirteen years on, and separated from its original context, Erotica sounds great. Lush and sinuous and swirling and faintly menacing, with prescient trip-hoppy stylings (before anyone had coined the term) that haven't dated a bit. How harsh we all were to the poor love.

Survival. (from Bedtime Stories)

In stark contrast: a bright, breezy, irresistable piece of light melodic pop, in which we can also see the first signs that Madonna is going to start singing less about universal themes, and more about personal themes. Possibly the first Madonna track which is strictly all about Madonna, and not about you or me. There were to be many, many more.

Drowned World/Substitute for Love. (from Ray Of Light)

And here's a prime example. Where Survival was playfully defiant, Drowned World is reflective - self-critical, even. Now there's a first. In essence: I've grown up, my priorities have changed, I've finally realised what's truly important and what's merely illusory. Dramatic, startling, moving. If only she had left the self-analysis right there.

Oh, and the music? Sonically gorgeous, with all sorts of inventive little noises trickling into the mix, courtesy of William Orbit's stunning production. An statement-of-intent overture for the all-new Spiritual Earth Mother Madonna. Her critical and commercial revival started here.

Music. (from Music)

Where Erotica pre-dated trip-hop, so Music pre-dates electroclash. Stark, stripped-down, and once again not at all what we were expecting. She's still one jump ahead of the game. Also her most unabashed "git your ass on that dancefloor and party" anthem in years. We're back in the disco at last! Hurrah!

American Life. (from American Life)

Even more stark, even more stripped-down, and only not what we were expecting because, frankly, we were expecting something rather more unexpected than this. Inspiring more accusations of being another unimaginative reduction/re-tread (and the stylistic similarities with Music are indeed undeniable), this is by turns awkward, stroppy, pissed-off, cryptic, confusing, mocking, self-obsessed and just plain daft. As album openers, Erotica said "Let's indulge ourselves" - Survival said, "I'm still here and I'm still smiling" - Drowned World said "This is the new me" - Music said "Let's all party" - and American Life says, flatly, "F**k it".

How to put five such strong and different songs in order then? Let's at least try...

5 points: Drowned World/Substitute For Love
4 points: Survival
3 points: Music
2 points: Erotica
1 points: American Life

5 4 3 2 1

Jump to next part.

Labels: whichmadonna

(Yes, I know I said I'd never use that stupid word again. Trouble is: I've rather grown to like it now. Blogosphere, blogosphere, blogosphere! With knobs on! Yah!)

1. The biggest excitement of last week? No contest: it had to be these two bloggers going public about being an item.

What made it more exciting: the disclosure slowly emerged as part of a lengthy comments box discussion that was made almost entirely in haiku. Such class.

What made it still more exciting (if you're me, that is): I realised that I had been actually sitting at the same table as both these bloggers on the occasion of their first meeting.

What made it even more exciting than that: Gert then spotted photographic evidence of this historic moment on Meg's site. A photo in which I appear to be giving the male blogger in question some rather, um, graphic making-out tips. Like I'm the bloody expert!

I ask you: who needs Heat magazine for vicarious thrills when we've got all of this going on?

But seriously. With all the drama of the past few months, her site has often been one of the most heart-wrenching, unflinchingly confessional reads around - and so it's wonderful to see such good cheer descend upon it at last.

---

2. Favourite new weblog du jour? I think it has to be Call Centre Confidential. One of those sites which works best when read from the very first post, and one which is still new enough for this to be a feasible proposition (the whole thing should take you well under 10 minutes). Admittedly rather lavatorial in places (if that bothers you at all), and I suspect not entirely 100% non-fictional all of the time, but I'm guessing that this is at least based on someone's real-life experience as a team leader in a call centre. I particularly liked the story about the broken tooth. You'll get to it soon enough.

---

3. Although normally peppered with sexually explicit photos of the non-work-safe variety, the front page of Kill Your Boyfriend is currently - at least at the time of writing - entirely cock-free. Which makes it an excellent time to discover the arrestiingly raw, truthful and moving writing which is contained therein. Try the entries for April 19 and April 22, for instance.

---

4. Picking up on my "A to B via C, see?" posting of last week, D of Acerbia has been discussing Zeno's Paradox. As a boy, this conundrum used to puzzle me greatly, and it was a long while before I could formulate a satisfactory resolution for it. Anyway, here's the paradox re-stated, using the more usual illustration of Achilles and the tortoise - and here's a neatly expressed solution for it.

---

5. After a hard day's toil at the bleeding edge of the pacey IBM mainframe world, I find there's nothing I like to do better with my spare time than count things. Creating order from randomness, or something. I find this a soothing activity. Or else it's those latent Asperger's Syndrome tendencies kicking in again.

So it was that I fell gleefully upon Diamond Geezer's recent "six degrees of blog separation" theorising. Naming his own site DG(0), and the sites on his blogroll DG(1), he then went through each of the DG(1) blogrolls, constructing a list of DG(2) blogs and determining which of them were linked to most often by his DG(1) blogs. This struck me as a good yardstick for determining which other sites I should be enjoying, based on the recommendations of the sites which I already do enjoy. For what recommendations could be more trusted than that? Woo-hoo! Time to open Excel and par-tay!

So, based on the blogrolls (or link pages) of my 30 TD(1) blogs, here's the list of my most recommended TD(2) blogs. Note that I have also excluded the 63 "occasional reads" on my separate list of "more favourite weblogs" list. (The TD(1.5)s?)

9 recommendations: Brainsluice.
Yes - very nearly a third of all my TD(1) blogs are regular readers of Dave Pannett's fine, content-rich, smartly designed weblog from New Zealand. I met him once, you know - back when he was still living in London and going to the weekly pop quiz nights at the Retro Bar. A deserved top placing for Brainsluice, then.

8 recommendations: The Audi Olympics.
Well, what a turn-up for the books this is. Firstly, Nigel Graber's site - like Anna Pickard's little.red.boat before it - is currently Site Of The Fortnight in Web User magazine's Blog On column. The next issue of Web User magazine hits the UK's newsagents this week - either on Wednesday or Thursday, depending on the efficiency of the newagent, price a mere 99p - and guess which site is going to be featured next? Oh, I couldn't possibly say. Modesty forbids, and all that. Secondly, Nigel himself popped up in one of my comments boxes only this very afternoon. Thirdly - now, how can I best put this? - a couple of months ago, Nigel posted an item about me (and the readers of this site) which was, well, less than wholly complimentary. But let's not dwell. The Audi Olympics has an idiosyncratic, surreal humour all of its own, and I've been paying it the occasional discreet incognito visit ever since The Unfortunate Incident In Question.

6 recommendations: Minor 9th, Scaryduck, Ultrasparky.

London-based teenage music student, winner of The Guardian's Best British Blog competition and recently "un-Wedded" gay New Yorker respectively. Three very different sites, all terrific in their own ways.

5 recommendations: Burnt toast, Harrumph, Lukelog, Textism, This is the goo i've got.

An American in Cambridge (the UK one), an outstandingly gorgeous photoblog (which I had never seen before doing this exercise), an Australian who used to live in London, an American in France (and this year's Best European Weblog at the Bloggies), and funny funny Pete Dot Nu (co-star of paragraph 1 above).

4 recommendations: Abraxas, Carpe Mañana, Cheesedip.com, Dragonthief, Grayblog, Jadedju, Jonno, Mighty Girl, Nick Jordan, What's New, Pussycat?

Of these, Cheesedip.com (from Manila), Jadedju (San Francisco?) and Mighty Girl (also San Francisco) are all completely new to me. Hmm. As K and I are seriously thinking about spending a couple of weeks based around San Francisco this Summer, maybe I should start actively cultivating a SF readership. Hello Jadedju! Hello Mighty Girl!

3 recommendations: A Small Victory, Blast!, Bluetealeaf, Digital Trickery, Embra Nights, Everything but, Frizzy Logic, Idiote, Jill Matrix, Jockohomo, kdblog, Keithers, Malpractice, Mentally Positive, Mermaniac, Orbyn, Pepys Diary, The Plastic Cat, Rambunctious, Squodge, Trabaca, Uffish, Where Is Raed?

OK, OK, enough bloglisting. This is getting silly. But ooh, there are 9 in this list of 23 which are also brand new to me. Shall I just go and take a quick peek? Shall I?

...but last week was, well, not the best of weeks. Mainly because I found myself quite unable to shake the malaise which had inexplicably descended upon me over the Easter break. A malaise which was aggravated all the more by the knowledge that it was entirely without cause or substance.

There was, therefore, only one solution: to flush away the misery in a tidal wave of alcohol on Friday night. This may not be the medically recommended solution, but all I can say is that - on the fortunately rare occasions when it is needed - it works a treat for me. Sure, the two-day hangover was predictably monstrous - but having successfully converted mental into physical pain, I found I could bear it with reasonably good grace.

Any residual heavy-limbed torpor was finally banished by means of a seven-mile hike yesterday afternoon. (It's a two-pronged strategy, you see: binge, then hike.) Starting in Alstonefield, we descended into Wolfscote Dale, following the river along the entire length of the dale until we reached Shining Tor. A steep and punishing climb of the tor afforded us spectacular views of both Wolfscote Dale and Milldale - at which point, it started to hail. Hard. This was most purgative. Descending into Milldale, we finally returned to Alstonefield along a steadily ascending road which, frankly, nearly did for me altogether.

This was both surprising and perplexing. Although by no stretch of the imagination an even remotely sporty person, I can at least credit myself with being a strong, fast walker - and seven mile hikes on Sunday afternoons are quite the norm for us these days. Indeed, there has barely been a Sunday afternoon in the past two or three months when we haven't donned our unflattering-but-practical walking trousers (the way they sag around the arse is simply too awful, darlings) and our Proper Serious Hiking Boots (mine are Meindls, and I love them dearly). No matter: judicious (okay, extensive) use of moan-and-groan power was enough to pull me through. And of course - as always - an hour or so later, I was as spry and as fit as a fiddle, with all vestigial traces of the hangover completely banished.

So. Back to normal, then. Might actually do a bit of writing this week, in that case.

Update: Hand-made trackback to Hydragenic.