Iestyn Edwards is...what?

  I did notice, apropos the BBC not being able to afford to keep the show, that Radio 3's afternoon programming on Saturday included random people playing their Grade Eight piano pieces.

  When I go back to opera, I must make sure that my programme headshot these days doesn't look exactly like the mortuary photo of Annie Chapman, second canonical Jack the Ripper victim.   Yes, I really must.

  I passed a small lorry being loaded with a child's stuff to take away to halls. Pillow and plants went in last.  A mother got on the 29, making sure her son knew where he was going. 'It's near the college itself, but the roads all seem too small.'   Everyone involved in the migrations was smiling their bravest and not fooling anyone.  

  A hyphenated, body warmer old lady once referred to me as a catamite. It reminded me of my dad referring to sex as twanging .  My singing teacher once had to remind me that in Down by the Sally Gardens, the poet's love is just a flibbertigibbet of a girl wandering around in her bare feet.  'The tone you're using sounds like it's all a bit muckily Freudian.'   

  In the street just now, two women catching sight of a late teen boy coming out of college stopped dead. A scowling, kipper footed much older woman clocked this, looked at him, said, 'Get a bloody job, no hoper!' and looked around for approbations.   One of the woman explained to her that, no, actually their reaction to  him - he was now gesturing What the fuck?  - had been one of delight at how handsome he was. 'Like a young Brando!'    The old lady snapped back, 'What the fuck are you involving me in all that for?' 

  Eleanor, who'd been a River's Bend resident since the spring of Princess Anne's divorce, didn't think that a psychic evening there would be quite the thing.     ' But, Caspar,' she remonstrated with the landlord, 'think where this might end.  Remember the thin end of the wedge over the switching off of the heated towel rail at the height of summer? Clothes pegs?  The Danish organist?  If Serena is allowed to have her peripatetic witches’ coven, there’ll follow peripatetic harpists, cake decorators, walk-in bath demonstrations, magicians, life-drawing classes, stair lift uprisings, tax advisors, taxidermists, computer experts, actuaries, string quartets, retro-nit nurses, One is Fun cookery demonstrations, lecturers on molluscs, sales of defunct library stock, cashers-in on mis-sold PPI, An Evening with Noel Coward with the inevitable three Nicaraguan lesbians dressed as the Lygon sisters who render the verses of “Matelot”, “Mrs Worthington and Co...

Gerard has been at it again.  One of his young cousins, Noah, has adopted a yak. And the yak sends Noah letters.  Gerard has started sending Noah letters from the yak.      Dear Noah,   I skip around coffee plantation clippy-cloppy today and sit now under tree to writing at you.  I have yesterday minus some days collect from post office box your lovely present, which I have eated.  Would you like some of it as dried droppings sent back to you, keep-safe?   Send more money immediate right now for yak-butted injury orphans.  I have made quite many of those. As for photo you asking for, I need know you are genuine because many yaks adopted here have send photo, and then get letters back from people say they lie down on settee with photo and dirty touch theyselves.   Love (but not in dirty-touch way) Yan Yak.    PS  Up the Red Cross!