Season of mud and mournful uselessness.

Absent mindedly wielding my strigel in the bathhouse this morning, I was totally underwhelmed by this week’s “In Our Time”(09:00 BBC Radio4). Two lady scientists were desperately trying to convince Melvin and us, that during the upsurge of modern science in the Enlightenment, the wives of famous scientists played a much larger role than hitherto expected. There may well be some truth in their argument but the lack of written evidence and the emphasis placed on tenuous deductions made the programme sound more like “woman’s Hour”. What next? Will we discover that Mrs Mozart composed most of the music and that Amadeus mimed while she played the piano off stage? Did the theory of relativity come to Mrs Einstein while she was changing the beds, who knows…?

This far flung corner of the Empire is in the grip of damp and darkness once again. Apart from the obvious disadvantages, one problem with the Cornish climate is that it makes people depressed. Old gits stare miserably into their flat pints of mild ale and can barely manage the lifting of a head to stare at a stranger. My favourite nurse at the surgery was so downcast yesterday that, as she delicately removed the fifteen staples from my knee, a tear moistened her sad eye.

Pip Pip,

the Leg.