Round The Prickly Jer

      Well, it has been a while since I added anything to this blog, and I've been receiving emails from people wondering if the Not-So-Doctor was indeed still alive and well (but obviously not living in Paris). Yes, yes, I'm alive and well, though sometimes it seems only barely, my exhaustion factor intensified by a persistently blasé sense of laziness. Writing anything more than a sentence or two has seemed as daunting as a moral imperative, and mercifully this unpaid sinecure that this blog provides allows me to disregard moral imperatives now and then. I know, alas, that much of the rest of today will be spent getting caught up on various emails that have accumulated in the past little bit, so I'll have to face those imperatives soon enough with almost catholic discipline. I'm not sure whether I should grumble or shrug. Perhaps both. A day ahead of endless grugging-- yes, that sounds about right. I guess I'll have to pay my dues in Canada.

      That last line, by the way (as some of you may have noticed from the new head quotes adjacent to Sir Alec), is an old line of Van Morrison's -- first from "These Dreams of You" from Moondance, and later from the title track of Morrison's Hard Nose The Highway, the latter an album I've been listening to again for the first time in some years. Hard Nose is one of Van's lesser albums, but it does feature the title track, the wistful "Wild Children," and the wonderfully evocative arrangement of the Scottish traditional "Purple Heather," another one of those songs in which The Man ends up scatting against a complement of strings as only he can. (The original traditional is sometimes called "Wild Mountain Thyme" or "Will You Go, Lassie.") The song is quite stunning, though I have to confess I never really thought about it before. It makes me wonder if there are situational ironies at work in the firmament, as so many things keep pointing of late to heathers, thistles, and hawthorns. Ah, such diabolical prickery. ("It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks?") Ah, through the sharp hawthorn.... (Yes, poor Jer's a-cold.  Bless thy five wits.)   One tarries to wonder if the universe is chuckling at its own rather nifty sense of humour.   Probably.   In fact, more than surely.   Hardy har har....

      (It's worth noting that Hard Nose also features the second strangest cover version the Belfast Cowboy ever did, his rendition of Joe Raposo's "Bein' Green," otherwise known as Kermit the Frog's theme song.   The strangest, for the record, is a song Morrison only did in concerts, truly bizarre and funny, and barn-burning, versions of -- wait for it -- "Send In The Clowns." Van singing Sondheim is like me singing Barry Manilow: unimaginable to the point of heresy.   Ribbit.)

      (Hmmm, this post may set new records for the greatest concentration of parentheses in a single entry. That probably says something about the state of my mind right now. Hey, it ain't easy bein' linear. Ribbit.)

      You'd think that after a week and change sans blogging the Not-So-Good Doc might have more profound things to say than he actually does. Grug. The past week has been shot through with oddities rather than conducements to focussed thought, though I'm by no means certain my brain is even functioning anymore. Oddities? Yes, oddities. The other night I was compared again-- for the SEVENTH time in three weeks-- to, of all people, Jeremy Irons, with whom I think I share as much resemblance as I do a garlic pickle, but there we go. The shared name may be prompting these associations in part, but the frequency of them has me wondering if I'm beginning to look like Claus von Bulow. ("You have no idea....")   And, yes, yes, I know how many of you are just busting at the seams to make a Humbert Humbert crack, to which I can only pre-emptively grug.   But it would figure that I'm now being all-too-regularly compared to a man 25 years my senior.   And people wonder why I feel old.  

      Oh, grug grug grug.... (So rudely forced.) I should have so much more to say, given the eventfulness of recent weeks, but I fear I'm Schivoed and Poped out, and I'm as sick of my own voice, cyber and actual, as I'm sure most of my recently-released students are. But for those of you that have been patiently waiting for some proof of the Not-So-Good Doctor's life, hopefully this little stream of unconsciousness ramble will suffice as evidence after a fashion. The week promises marking and a lot of ironing (Ironsing?) out of Things, the normal lot come April. Ugh. We'll see if I can resuscitate this blog in the next bit. Maybe. Why then maybe Ile fit you. Jeronymo's mad agine. Indeed.

      And, one more thing: Ribbit.

      ADDENDUM:   In a word: Crap.  

      This blog officially stands bemusedly corrected.   I may have to rethink that garlic pickle thing.