Well Played, Sir!

I am, to put it mildly, knackered tonight, after a day spent with Jane preparing and eating this evening's meal with the boys, over here from their fastness on Ynys Môn for a Sunday visit.  This morning, I attacked the smaller holly tree afresh with probably too much gusto, after having woken this morning from the kind of mad dreaming that always goes with having dropped back off to sleep after dawn: in this case three times in succession. This always leaves me feeling wiped out on rising, and usually the only way to shake the feeling off is to get outside and do something real. Nevertheless, the cumulative effects of the foregoing added to the pollen being very high up here today, have left me in a state of itchy torpor with few thoughts to my name and still less inclination to write about them. Anyhow, beneath all the clamour over the world's first trillionaire, huge data centres, Japanese nuclear reactors, tens of thousands of satellites cluttering up our near-earth orbit so that human beings can suck more useless tripe data out of the ether - and pay for the privilege [in more ways than one!] - eventually leading to yet another bandwidth crisis in the next few years and yet more of the same; the only really significant news event of the week for me was the announcement of the death of David Hockney at 88, long a hero of mine in the art world. Someone likened his skill as a draughtsman to that of Picasso, a statement with which I wholeheartedly concur, and like Picasso, he was of that very rare breed of artists who had huge success whilst still living, both critically and in terms of sales. A good innings from a great man...