Oh Well

The dog ate it. I was ill. The wi-fi was down.

None of those are true. I must admit I thought it had been two weeks since I wrote a blog. It's been four. That is really slack. And I don't have a great excuse, I just haven't got around to it. Sorry!

What have I missed? Well, some of you may have missed my Voxcetera concert which played to a packed St Sepulchre in London last week. It was fabulous to do, and I think those attending enjoyed it too. For the first time we really took ownership of some tricky Britten and, having now heard a recording, made it sound really good. Plus of course there are those spine-tingling moments - like the way the D minor fortissimo chord towards the end of the Esenvalds piece just hung in the air and never seemed to die away.

Back to earth with a bump, I watched "Mr Toad and the Sell-Out" on BBC last night (aka the Lib Dem and UKIP debate). Clegg is Mister Political Expediency - and has been so often that he's probably retained the trophy by now. But Farage - dear God help us. In the same way as creationism got clever by evolving (maybe a bad choice of word there) into intelligent design, UKIP is just a more respectable "we hate Jonny-foreigner" party isn't it.

Watching the debate over a grotty internet link and Twitter makes one smugly complacent that no-one's falling for that old shit again. But I fear that's not the case. UKIP is generally picking up support across the spectrum, from those who are disenchanted with the political class and with, generally "Them". It's Farage's affable pub-bore facade that makes him so credible with so many. They are going to do well in the Euro elections - it's not a question of whether they beat the Lib Dems for 3rd place. I'm afraid they will do a lot better than that. That is just so embarrassing. Farage is a French M. Le Ros-bif  caricature. And Stew Lee's brilliant dissection of UKIP a couple of weeks ago doesn't counter it - UKIP voter's aren't watching stuff like that.

In case you hadn't noticed, alongside getting fit, my 'don't get political' and 'don't get sweary' New Year's resolutions have gone by the board. If you keep coming back to the blog for its gentle humour and flights of fancy, you may be disappointed (though I've not written for four weeks, so on reflection probably no more than you have been already).

Anyway, back to work... more soon