And a Chappy Chanukah to you, choney.

Merriment all around, and Mrs Pouncer has pushed off. Which aspect of Yulish horror was the last straw, one wonders? And is there an English cliche more hackneyed than "last straw"? It's a good cliche, though. When I cast off a particular aspect of my job, it really was a last straw that pushed me over the edge: it was trivial, compared to the series of bastardries that had been inflicted on me, and something snapped.

Good god, the most accurate way of describing my life is via cliche. I shall drink port. Warre's '63, I think.

Bristol fashion

This is a curious town. Recently work has been bringing me here; downtown many of the buildings are very beautiful, in a way that I lack the technical language to express, but next to them are hideous, ghastly, abominable concrete hulks from the sixties, so horrible that they've been abandoned but not, alas, demolished. I stay in an attractive modern building in an otherwise seedy area; trust me, I know seedy, having lived in the West Village in the mid 80's, in an unattractive unmodern building. The most beautiful thing is the river and the way it drapes the city, but they really need to get rid of the concrete.

Real life intrusion

A colleague has just had a book published. Well, it's his in some extended sense; it's a sort of encyclopaedia of which he is the main editor, but he's making a tremendous fuss of telling the world about it and inviting them to the launch party. This poses a problem. No, not that one, I'm not consumed with envy; it's quite the opposite, I'm thrilled: the book's terrible. Long, long-winded, yet vacuous, it's supposed to be useful to anyone, professional or amateur, who wants to find out what's going on in the subject, either in general or in specifics. But it's so bad that I can't imagine anyone learning anything from it. So: what do I say to him that does not totally reveal my true opinion? The etiquette books are silent on this point.