Holy Days
Holidays are Holy Days! School half-term begins at one o' clock today, the weather is fine, and all I'm doing this morning is teaching my favourite Bill text, Twelfth Night. [The 'Bill' bit is not just a diminutive for William Shakespeare, but also acknowledges 16th Century playbills.] If music be the food of love, play on... I'm hungry today, with an appetite as wide as the sea, red-blooded and full, not 'distempered' like Malvolio's.

Flying
Women are such flighty creatures that God must have been uncertain when he made them. Or maybe God was literally in two minds at that moment; or maybe there were even two gods: what does the ancient text say, Male and female they made them in God's image. In any case, thinking was in terms of the two, of the composite, of the pair that maketh one (and the one who maketh another one, and another one, anon and anon). Anyway, women can be sweetness, grace and light one day and crass, loud and yearning for junk culture the next--real AC/DC. This hit home to my eardrums when the radio was turned on (I never listen to the radio normally; I loathe normal radio) and tuned to a local station at high volume. The previous day had been relaxing, soothing, a much-needed respite from the wasteland of UNTHINK, but the enemy had infiltrated the ranks...

Red Shoes
Actually, no, I’ve never owned a pair of red shoes although I did see an attractive pair in Rome once that I later regretted not buying. My first-ever suit was of blue, crushed velvet though, and I do remember something about some purple satin trousers…
The poet Adrian Henri once wrote a line about loving a woman more than all his red leather waistcoats, and when I first read it I was struck by the flamboyance in the line: red leather waistcoats! Ugh! But I realise now that the extravangance goes with the territory. What could be more appropriate in connection with a declaration of love than clothing so brazen, so outlandishly bigger than life?
Being a teenager is also a brash, brazen and outlandish time of life, so the blue crushed velvet suit went with those dayzgonby--and the fact that I was no longer a teenager by then is probably the reason why I didn't buy those red shoes.