i only came to say hello...

not coming home any time soon

Oh, hi there! It's been a while since we've seen you!

grendel, your pea soup is ready...

It's the line of the poem. Most famous and best remembered: "ða com of more under misthleoþum Grendel gongan, godes yrre bær" He came off the moor, under the mist-cliffs, Grendel striding, bearing the wrath of God.

How could a thick fog at the cliffs not remind me of that line, and of Grendel's powerful, furious stomping... But also of the injured monster - retreating from his encounter with Beowulf, arm torn off, slouching back to his cave, to see his monster mum. A substantial portion of the poem is devoted to Grendel's mum (rather curiously portrayed by the foxy Angelina in the recent film). So perhaps she did brew him up some restorative soup, before heading out to slaughter Hrothgar's men in their sleep... thanx mum. x. gr.

there's clearly something about monster mums that i find absurdly amusing...

nice to meet you...

clearly some further adventures from the hedgehog and the bear cub who aren't always on time... it's good to hear that they've found a friendly broken-down lamppost on the boardwalk to share their favourite hobby with.

pirate gold

I like to think of the sea as a seducer of young men, bright eyed and open, with adventure in their hearts: Men who leapt gladly from the underhanded, Shanghai-ing, political world of the privateers, into the democratic arms of honest share-and-split-the-booty-alike piracy, cutlass between teeth and a flintlock, tied to end of a colourful silk sash...

On sleep disruption...

REM sleep is the first stage of a typical sleep cycle. It is characterised by Rapid Eye Movements, and typically accompanied by dreams. Freud proposed that dreams give a window into the subconscious mind, and put forward a complex interpretive structure detailing what different symbols appearing in dreams might really mean. His proposals about the subconscious are largely untestable, and there's a general consensus that his Interpretation is no better than the obvious: things that appear in our dreams might sometimes reflect something that is on our mind - something that the brain needs to deal with - but equally, they often don't.

In other news, it's been a while since we've considered cucumber sandwiches... Perhaps I'm yearning for a slice of summer...