Of daffs, a missing penis, melting-down, Byron rescued, a smashing time at the airport, cats vs octopus and the hit-maker

Do you have a "Sussex Beacon" in your garden? The RHS needs help to map the UK’s daffodils as part of its new ‘Daffodil Diaries’ project, and to find varieties that are thought to be lost.

It's another snippets post, dear reader:

• "Penisgate" news: Italy’s state broadcaster RAI has been accused of censorship after using an image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man with the genitals missing in the opening credits for its Winter Olympics coverage. It's not the first penis-related controversy to hit the Winter games, either!
• Festival melted-down? news: The eclectic and unpredictable annual Meltdown music festival - previously overseen by cultural giants such as (among others) David Bowie, Grace Jones, David Byrne, Patti Smith, Scott Walker, Jarvis Cocker and Nick Cave - is a highlight of the Southbank Centre's summer schedule, and the 2026 event is to be curated this year [to mark the Centre's 75th anniversary] by... former boyband member and modern "style icon" Harry Styles. Ho hum. We shall see what he comes up with that might tempt us (for the first time in years) to even want to bother buying a ticket...

• Byron's moving news: A memorial statue of the 19th Century poet Lord Byron marooned on an inaccessible traffic island on Park Lane for decades and left to deteriorate is to be restored and moved to a new home in Hyde Park. “Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt / In solitude, where we are least alone.” Indeed.
• First road rage, then air rage, now "boarding pass rage"? news: Check-in at the airport can be frustrating, but... this man took it to a new level in Hong Kong International airport! I think I'd just sit in the Wetherspoons and wait, tbh.
• Favourite headline of the year so far: Cats to Blame for Octopus Deity Enshrinement Delay. Love it.
• And finally: RIP Billy Steinberg, the most famous and prolific songwriter you never heard of. A list of just some of the songs he wrote reads like a "Best of" album of the last few decades:
  • Madonna - Like A Virgin
  • Cyndi Lauper - True Colors
  • Bangles - Eternal Flame
  • Roy Orbison/Cyndi Lauper - I Drove All Night
  • Heart - Alone
  • Whitney Houston - So Emotional
  • Divinyls - I Touch Myself
  • Pretenders - I'll Stand By You
  • Tina Turner - Look Me In The Heart
  • Melanie C - I Turn To You

  ...and this one, a fave of mine:

Robert Miles feat. Maria Nayler - One & One

And the weather? Not bad. [Today was a lovely, occasionally sunny, dry day - but bloody cold!}

Kung Hei Fat Choy! - and more

Out with the (trouser) Snake and in with the (hung like a) Horse..?

...yes, it is Chinese (Lunar) New Year today - the Year of the Fire Horse. I apologise to anyone who thinks it sacrilegious, but this was the first song that immediately came to mind:

Father Ted - My Lovely Horse

Meanwhile...

In Hispanic/Latin American countries (and across the world) today is Mardi Gras ["Fat Tuesday"], or Carnaval - a time for outrageously OTT feathered costumes, salsa music and a heavy dollop of camp...

...while in Britain, we have Pancake Day. Toss that!

Since there are fewer songs about the latter than the former, try this:

Dario G - Carnaval De Paris

[OK, OK - I know it's actually a number written for a football competition, but it's a great choon!]

Enjoy your fatty, fried, pancake-y treats - or indeed your Niángāo cake!

---

PS

By sheer coincicence - it also happens to be the start of Ramadan, to boot!

Of course, I'm not sure I know an appropriate song for that.

Can even feathers, fouff and faff save us now?

Aaaaaarggghhh!

After a rather lovely sixteen days away - it's time to face the shit all over again, and I am really not in the mood for all this. People had better keep their heads down - "Mama's diet pill is wearing off..."

Meanwhile...

...it is a Tacky Music Monday, regardless - and we need something spectacular to serve as a wake-up call!

With memories of Spain slowly fading into the ether, here's one of that country's finest, the very lovely, late, great Rocio Durcal with a whole scream [I assume that is the correct collective noun] of safety gays (and what could well be her mother and her auntie, to boot), and a number that really fits the bill perfectly:

Rocio Durcal - Final de Las Leandras

Have a good week, dear reader. I won't.

Soft cars?

Yesterday was glorious Spring-like, sunny day - and I spent several fruitful hours in the extensive gardens here at Dolores Delargo Towers, clearing sycamore-seed-clag, and "banishing (more) death" by cutting-back any browned and frosted foliage and stems I could see; I sorted out and repotted a few languishing ferns, and had a general move-around of some pots; I also cleared our new shelving ready to give it a scrub and [finally] put some Spring-flowering stuff (bulbs, wallflowers, primulas) into the eyeline of the bench [although I never actually finished that task, as it started to get a bit overcast and gloomy and I'd had enough by then]. Today, it was pissing it down all morning (apparently). It certainly was when I got up a couple of hours ago - so any plans to continue the momentum are on hold, unfortunately...

On my last day of freedom before the grind of work begins again tomorrow, I get to take it easy instead - and what better way to enhance that mood than with a little something from the geniuses at Soft Tempo Lounge - and some vintage cars?

Soft Tempo Lounge - Girls and their Cars

Ah, that's better.

[Music: The Continentals - Undecided]

Happy to have, not to have not

"Saint Valentine used to be the patron saint of lovers, now he seems to be the patron saint of card makers." Edward Stilliard

Yup. "St Hallmark's Day" is upon us - a day that sees hordes of chavs clogging the supermarket queues to buy bunches of red flowers that look like the sort of thing tied to some railings where a cyclist got killed; the only day in the calendar that such horrors as rose-scented chocolates are ever a "thing", and when sales of made-in-China fluffy toys with sickly "love" slogans go up.

John Lydon has the right idea:

Public Image Limited - This Is Not A Love Song

My sentiments, exactly.

I wake the possessed

Paraskevidekatriaphobia - such a lovely word.

Yes, at the end of this rather dismal (weather-wise) extra week off after our Spain trip, it also happens to be Friday the Thirteenth, the bad luck day [if you believe in all that sort of stuff]!

I don't. I believe in being invisible - like our old faves Gravitonas!

Gravitonas - Lucky Star

Cause I look to the east
And I look to the west
And I bless my lucky star
Bless my lucky star
I'm invisible, visible
Un-visible, oh oh

So I bow to the priest
And I wake the possessed
And I bless my lucky star
Bless my lucky star
I'm invisible, visible
Un-visible, oh oh

Thank Disco(?) It's Friday - and have a great weekend, peeps!

Feels like I'm going to lose my mind

Classier times...

Timeslip moment again, dear reader...

We've been deposited with a bump by a Trimaxion Drone Ship forty years ago in the distinctly alien world of 1986 - the year of Chernobyl, the controversial Diego Maradona "Hand of God" goal that won the World Cup for Argentina over England, the "tombstone" AIDS awareness campaign in the UK, Neighbours, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, Lady in Red by Chris de Burgh, the Westland affair, The Golden Girls, Abu Nidal, Andrew and Fergie's wedding, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Suzy Lamplugh, "If you see Sid, tell him", Casualty, the kidnap of British journalist John McCarthy in Beirut, Gary Lineker, the "Zammo Maguire" heroin addiction storyline in Grange Hill and "Just Say No", Top Gun, the Iran-Contra Affair, Russ Abbott, Desmond Tutu, "Den and Angie" in Eastenders, the US bombing of Libya, "Get away from her, you bitch!", the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games, Jeremy Bamber, Crocodile Dundee,, the Cameroon lake eruption that killed 2000 people and hundreds of animals, Colin Baker as Doctor Who, and the so-called "Big Bang" deregulation of the London Stock Exchange

It was the year Rafael Nadal, Jamie Bell, Lady Gaga, Richard Madden, Charlotte Church, Robert Pattinson, Usain Bolt, Kit Harington, Jenna Coleman, Ellie Goulding, Laura Carmichael, the M25 Motorway, the Mir space station, Comic Relief, the Fox Broadcasting Company, Pixar and Phantom of the Opera were all born; and James Cagney, Pat Phoenix, Wallis Simpson, Cary Grant, Elsa Lanchester, Phil Lynott, Hylda Baker, Christopher Isherwood, Anna Neagle, Robert Helpmann, Benny Goodman, Ray Milland, Lady Diana Cooper, Alan Jay Lerner, Harold MacMillan, Peter Pears and Hermione Baddeley all died, and the Greater London Council and the six Metropolitan County Councils were abolished.

In the news in February of that year? Britain was in the middle of a "big freeze", with heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures; after an absence of 76 years Halley's Comet returned - and was a bit of a "damp squib" [I remember spotting it in a break in the clouds, and it looked like a smudgy fingerprint on glass]; the Wapping strike over digitisation of newspapers became a near-riot; President "Baby Doc" Duvalier of Haiti and President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines were both deposed; Mikhail Gorbachev introduced his Glasnost and Perestroika [openness and transparency] policies; Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated; the UK signed the Single European Act aimed at creating a single market; and we bade a fond farewell to Dandy Nichols, famous as "Elsie", long-suffering wife of "Alf Garnett" in Till Death Us Do Part. In our cinemas: Muppets Take Manhattan; Rocky IV; Spies Like Us. On telly: Blackadder II; The Colbys; Catchphrase.

And what of the charts this week in '86? Billy Ocean held onto the top slot for a second week (and would stay there for another two) with When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going [helped a lot, no doubt, by it being the theme song for The Jewel of the Nile, and the presence of the film's stars Danny DeVito, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as backing singers in the video]. Making up the rest of the Top Ten:, Whitney-fucking-Houston, one-hit wonders Double (The Captain of Her Heart), A-Ha, The Damned, James Brown, Five Star, (ahem) Nana Mouskouri and (ahem, again) Su Pollard were all present and correct.

However, this song [only held off the top slot by the success of Billy and his chums] was at #2 - a re-release, no less. It's one of my favourite of Our Glorious Leader's choons!

Madonna - Borderline

FORTY-fucking-years? Where did they go?!