Did I tell you that my Mistress went into York to do some research for her book? It’s really funny when you’re writing. You can use made up places and then you can imagine them to be anything you like as you write about them, but people like reading about real places and then going to visit them to see if they are anything like they appeared in the book. It was an excuse for a bit of a pub crawl, although as she was driving and it was the middle of the day it was just an excuse to drink a number of bottles of fruit juice. The pubs she had chosen were really very different in character. One was a fairly standard city centre pub and the other was a tiny place with loads of character and lots of men drinking real ale and scrumpy. She wasn’t sure she fitted in quite so well in the latter of the two. What surprised her was just how busy they were on a Saturday afternoon. Admittedly it was raining, but when you live in a village you become quite unused to crowds. I prefer it that way and I think she does too.
I presume by now you’ve probably seen that our Eurovision entry managed to come bottom. Why do we enter? We know that the Eastern European countries vote for each other and the Western European countries (with one or two possible exceptions) vote for anyone other than the UK. Let’s face it, when it comes to singing, everyone might choose to use our language to make their songs more accessible but it still doesn’t mean they like us! The other thing that is odd being back in the UK is that you can only get the Eurovision song contest on one channel in one language. We used to enjoy flipping between broadcasts by lots of different countries in lots of different languages and finding that they were all equally bad. Oh well, maybe next year. Perhaps we should enter a song in one of the Baltic languages to see if we could pick up a few votes from somewhere different.