Block, block, block
        At the foot of thy wicket, O Scotton!
        And I would that my tongue would utter
        My boredom. You won't put the pot on!

        Oh, nice for the bowler, my boy,
        That each ball like a barndoor you play!
        Oh, nice for yourself, I suppose,
        That you stick at the wicket all day!

        And the clock's slow hands go on,
        And you still keep up your sticks;
        But oh! for the lift of a smiting hand,
        And the sound of a swipe for six!

        Block, block, block,
        At the foot of thy wicket, ah do!
        But one hour of Grace or Walter Read
        Were worth a week of you!

A satirical poem from Punch after a long defensive innings from Willaim Scotton.  With 6 wickets down already today, I think we could do with a Scotton, or a mammoth performance from Freddie and Stu because I don't hold much hope for the tail..

I just saw an advert online to "Win £500 of Primark Vouchers".

I assume that with that you can buy the whole company, right?

This is me in a word cloud, made on wordle.net .  You just enter in your blog address and it returns something like this based on the frequency words occur on your blog.  It's really rather fun.   Hat tip to Georgia for pointing out the site she comes up with better ideas for blog entries than I do.

You can view the large version here .

It seems my blog is becoming a total book blog!

I never did find first sentences easy to write, the solution I've found is to steal someone else's words; I can resist anything but temptation.  (Stolen from Oscar Wilde, in case anyone has spent their formulative years having a life instead of geeking on quotes)  The temptation he was referring to isn't one I'm inclined to myself, but every man to his poison and my poison is book stores.  I love the fact that you can travel anywhere without leaving the store, to any place or time period.  The great thing about books is that there are so many there is something for everyone.

The biggest news in publishing for the past year or two, however, has been the Richard and Judy book club.  Now, I have nothing against Richard and Judy, they seem good, nice people; not working class but not middle class enough to make anyone uncomfortable.  However, I can't figure out the book club.  It just seems like reading for people who are indifferent to reading, it has the feel of one big marketing pitch, it's a very successful one and I'm glad some authors have made good money from it, but it still just feels like selling.

I watched it this evening, not wishing to criticise it out of hand, and it was much as suspected.  It wasn't criticism, it was nice people saying nice things about a book which I assume is nice.  No one offered any criticism, yet at the same time you can tell by the way they speak that the book was just another book, it wasn't one of those books.  I much prefer Newsnight Review where you can guarantee not everyone will play nice and you'll find out more about what the book is really like.

If you're going to choose a handful of books to big-up for the year they should be every last one of them books that make people love them or hate them.  No one ever put books like For Whom The Bell Tolls down and were indifferent.  I want to hear what it really made people feel, what it really made them think, I want to know if it made them fall in love or if it tore out their heart, I want a real opinion. 

This isn't to say that you don't get some good books on the list, I mean, William Boyd - Restless made the cut and Boyd is a fantastic writer. It just feels like it's all a sales pitch and one that is potentially damaging for the book market.  You get eight or nine books selling half a million copies, but what about everyone else who have now even less chance of being seen in the shop when the best places are hogged by rows of Book Club stickered books?

It leaves me divided because one the one side it gets some people reading who probably wouldn't read otherwise and helps them find books, that is a really good thing.  But it just seems like it is somehow negative, it seems less about the books themselves and it removes the element of choice.  It takes out the joy of finding a book you've never heard of in the shop, or of reading a review and thinking "yes, that sounds right for me." It makes for a whole lot of sheep going to buy what they're told is good and degrades the medium to that of a pop chart.

I know this probably makes me an unbearable book snob, but at least I'm honest about it, right? What do you all think?

A good piece on the first post about Simon Mann.  I have to say, it's pretty shameful how little it seems our Govt. have done for the chap.  I know that he broke the law, but lets face it he was trying to depose an evil psycho.  It's like if someone stole an axe murderers axe.  Yes, they'd have broken the law, but it may have proved helpful. 

I hate this mamby pamby lets not be too hard on the evil dictator mentality.  If the government is too scared to soil it's hands on Zimbabwe then I see no reason why they shouldn't indulge in black ops.  This isn't Latin America in the 80's when the Black ops were supporting dictators, this would be quite the opposite.

The worst thing about working for the labour party, (besides the fact that I couldn't be further from them politically, think they've screwed the country and am appalled at their readiness to get rid of habeas corpus) is without a doubt the colour scheme.

Everytime you go to make something it's pretty much going to be red and white.  I'm bored.  But it seems that for Labour MP's no other colour scheme really works.  So, I'm stuck trying to find new ways of using the colour scheme of Nazism and the Soviets.  Ace.