The idea is to come up with 150 words of prose, packed with as many infuriating words and phrases as possible.
At the end of the massive rock molars of the narrow pass of the Yecla in the mountains of Burgos, high crags of stone look as if they have been sawn off in slices by a saw. From ledges on the rock I saw that black birds like crows would dive off head first, speeding down through the air till they opened their wings like parachutes and swung away.
I couldn’t make out what birds they were. They were crow-like, but perhaps they might be jackdaws. I asked a local man and he said they called them "grajos".
This is usually translated rooks, but they weren’t behaving like the rooks I remember from childhood in the elm rookery.
There is another poem from the Middle Ages with the refrain “Quia amore langueo.” I mentioned the yesterday.
The second, anonymous, poem follows the same structure and takes up the chivalric theme. Instead of Christ as the suffering knight, we find the Virgin Mary as the courtly lover of mankind.
The poem is just too far from modern speech to be readily comprehensible, but there is a translation that Seamus Heaney has praised, made by the poet Oliver Bernard (in his book Verse c, Anvil Press, £9.
95). Here is the first stanza.
The phrase “In a valley of this restless mind”, which I used yesterday, might be familiar to some as the title of a book by Malcolm Muggeridge.
He took it from a medieval poem, of which it forms the first line.
I was walking through a valley full of green wheat last week, some distance from Lerma in the province of Burgos, with no house or person in view, when it came into my mind that I should like to hear again the record Prophets Seers and Sages, the Angels of the Angels, made by Tyrannosaurus Rex in 1968, when Marc Bolan was still performing with Steve Peregrin Took (real name Stephen Ross Porter; at least he didn’t call himself Ernil I Pheriannath).
Well, I couldn’t, so had to content myself with singing a few tracks to myself.
No one heard.
We’ve just passed the centenary of Edgar Lustgarten, born into a Jewish family in Manchester on May 3 1907. His father was a barrister.
Edgar went to Manchester Grammar School and St John’s College, Oxford. He became President of the Oxford Union.
He was called to the bar, practised on the Northern Circuit and enjoyed working with juries, since they were “susceptible to an emotional appeal”.
I’ve just been to that strange enclave of tranquility on the edge of the City of London, the Charterhouse. It is a little like an Oxford college with medieval quadrangles and later additions and refacings, but all in a harmonious style.
An gives some idea, although there are also other surprisingly green spots nearby, including the courtyards of the Barbican, which do not possess the same quiet attraction.
You have probably been wondering where Nicholas Breton’s portrait of May is, since it’s now the second of the month.
Well, here it is, copied from his Fantasticks, published in 1626 and now out of print.
Spying is in the air, with the controversy over intelligence on the al-Qa’eda-inspired bomb plotters.
On the television they have been re-running Smiley’s People, the adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel, with those wonderful performances by Alec Guinness, and, all too briefly, Beryl Reid.
My friend Damian Thompson has been having a go at for giving ill-informed interpretations of Muslim teaching.
Miss Armstrong can look after herself in her row with the critic of Islam, .
The man who has had the most influence on the reputation of St Thomas More was born 100 years ago today in Vienna. He is Frank Zinnemann, the director of the film A Man for All Seasons.
The film, which came out in 1966, closely followed the text of the brilliant play by Robert Bolt (1960).
The film made More really well known in America for the first time.
Why are we so ignorant of the stars? Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Sky at Night programme, presented by Patrick Moore.
Neil Tweedie interviewed the at the end of March.
Should cathedrals charge for entry? A reader complained in today’s about the ruinous cost of taking a family to see the great building.
Cathedrals do not get Government subsidies as museums do. So how are they supposed to keep their ancient fabric standing?
I was talking with a friend, who is very ready to criticise churchmen, about the nature of faith.
He said he could not help it if he had not been given the gift.
It was the genius of Alan Ross to draw up a theory of U and non-U English, which he published in 1954 in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, the same linguistic journal, as it happens, in which Noam Chomsky outlined his theories of deep-structure in language.
Pogonotrophy has become acceptable in rapping circles, one of my colleagues was amused to find, and .
Pogonotrophy is now accepted among rappers
I enjoyed the lyrics of his jolly number Thou Shalt Kill, with music by Dan Le Sac, and the video was OK once or twice, having been filmed around Smithfield Market in London.
Mr Pip is by way of being a bit of a poet, and some of his lyrics have a gnomic wisdom that commands assent:
I rather think that we knew quite a bit of what was coming in the new .
And not all the phraseology (eg, “for many”) in the leaked draft seems to be quite settled.
Take the text of the Creed. This is identical to the
Tremendous excitement is a stirring, now that the Grand National is over, about the new translation of the Mass that Damian Thompson to on Friday.
Of course the mystery cultic sacrifice is unchanged, but some of the poetic repetitions and variations of the ancient Latin have been restored.
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