This morning, for a brief and shining moment, I thought I had achieved the impossible - that I had managed to completely use up a bar of soap!
But, alas, my triumph was punctured almost immediately, when I discovered that I had in fact just dropped the final tiny square. The bar had therefore defeated my efforts to use it up entirely.
Hopefully, that won't prove to be a metaphor for the rest of my day.
A year ago, Jeremy Corbyn was widely hated by the powers-that-be in the Labour party. This year, at conference, those same powers-that-be have been lauding him as the second coming, with their chants of "Oh Jeremy Corbyn", the bearing of the portrait of the sainted one, and other such nonsense. It's turned into a really bizarre cult of personality.
And let's not kid ourselves: this isn't due to some mass conversion to Corbyn's policies. Rather, it's due to one thing only: Labour's election success.
Except...
Labour lost the election. Worse than that, Labour ran the most energised and successful campaign of the last 20 years, were up against the most pathetic Tory campaign for a similar length of time (though, in fairness, it's a toss-up whether Major in '97 or Hague in '01 was worse), and still couldn't win.
Sure, it's a kind of success, but only relative to the utter pounding that they (and I) thought they were going to get. It wasn't an actual success, as indicated by the current inhabitant of No. 10.
So all this business of being on the "threshold of power" is a nonsense. Firstly because there is unlikely to be another election for four years, and it's damn-near certain the Tories won't make the same mistakes again (which isn't to say that they won't make all-new mistakes, of course). Frankly, though, all of this triumphalism feels awfully like the exact same mistake the Tories made earlier this year - that of taking the voters for granted.
So, really, I'm wondering what the Labour party are currently thinking? Is it just sheer relief that they're still in jobs? Or is it perhaps that the country is so screwed that they figure they might as well party before the apocalypse comes?
(And, also, I'm wondering just how to deal with all of this. Within the UK, the only choices are a Tory-led government or a Labour-led one. The thought that this represents our only hope is pretty galling.)
#41: "Pathfinder: Vault of the Onyx Citadel", by Larry Wilhelm
#42: "Go Set a Watchman", by Harper Lee
#43: "Surface Detail", by Iain M. Banks
There's trouble brewing in Spain. The Catalan government has decided to hold a binding referendum on independence, in defiance of the Spanish government and the constitution. The Spanish government have responded by laying charges against Catalan government officials, by shutting down pro-independence websites, sending armed police to seize referendum materials, ordering newspapers not to publish any information about the referendum... and even by sending in tanks.
And on the BBC... nothing. There's nothing on their news homepage, there's nothing on the European news page, and nothing on the TV news. Basically, as far as the BBC is concerned, it's not happening.
Now, I've written before that I consider the question of Catalan independence to be a matter for the Catalan people, and I consider that the Madrid government is making a bad mistake in their handling of the whole matter. But I'll readily acknowledge that other interpretations are entirely valid - and in particular, the argument that the constitution needs to be respected is a strong one.
But regardless of your views on the specific issue, what surely can't be denied is that Barcelona is a popular travel destination for Brits going abroad (even this late in the season), and it's the focal point of this whole great mess. That being the case, surely the BBC have the duty to report the facts of the situation, so that people can make an informed choice if nothing else?
So, BBC: what the hell are you playing at? Why isn't this being properly reported?
And so, we get to the end of another competition season. A year ago, I didn't expect to be doing another one of these - I thought we would have been moved long ago, and would probably have left the band at that point. But as it happened, the move wasn't until quite late in the season, by which point I'd committed to seeing out the year.
The season was very much a major/minor split - we had very disappointing results at all four of the majors we attended, but actually had quite a lot of success at the minor competitions. That's very much a step forward from last year (barring one very good result at Forres in 2016), but it's still quite hard to take. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any prospect of the band being moved up for next year, so my hopes of seeing that done before I leave have come to nothing.
There's actually not much more to say than that. We had some poor behaviour at Forres, and some drunkenness at some other events, but nothing like the disasters of previous years. Which is good, but still not really good enough. But I'm filing that under "someone else's problem".
The other big thing, though, is that the season is just too damn long - far too many events in June, and too many events after the World Championships bring an end to the 'real' season. On the other hand, it does make the decision to leave a no-brainer, as I simply cannot commit to being involved in the band (or indeed any competing band) for the whole of the summer.
Moving forward, my next step is to find a non-competing band to join, so that I retain the motivation to keep practicing, and to do their few events. But I'm done with competition, probably forever.
And now, the end is near.
The last competition of the season was at Innerleithen yesterday. It was a good day, mostly, though the competition itself didn't go as well as might be hoped.
Actually, it's worth noting here that there's a classic mistake that the band always makes. We know that if we play too long in the preparation, our drones get wet and start to go wrong. And so every time we say to ourselves that we're not going to play too much before going on. And then, every single time, we play too much before going on, our drones get wet, and that wrecks the sound.
Oh well.
The day itself was pretty good - it looked like rain, and yet we managed to avoid it. We tuned up, we went on, and we played. The performance was... okay. Not great, and the other band that were up for Champion-of-Champions were markedly better, but it was okay. Then, a bit later, we tuned up and played in the grade above, which was also okay. (That said, both times our Pipe Major, who wasn't playing for health reasons, had a real go at the pipers after the competition. Which I thought was both a little unfair and also wasn't terribly helpful. But it's not my problem any longer.)
And then we came to the march past, the prize-giving, and the street parade. And for all of these, in honour of it being my last competition, our Pipe Sergeant asked me to take the lead, which was very nice of him I thought.
In the event, I had to go collect three prizes - we won the Marching & Discipline prize (not sure how, really), came second in Grade 4B (2nd for piping, 5th for drumming, out of 5), and fourth in the Grade 4A (4th for piping, 3rd for drumming, out of 5). We missed out on Champion-of-Champions, which was not unexpected - it went to Davidson Mains & District, who also won the Grade 4B contest. The truth is that the result wasn't particularly close - although we were second to their first, we were a very distinct second to their clear first.
And that was that - a decent day to end a hard season, and a fitting end to my competition career. And now there is just the AGM, and I'm out. Which is quite a thing.
The penultimate competition of the season was last weekend at Peebles. The most intriguing aspect of the day was that our pipe major was absent for health reasons, meaning that we were led out by our pipe sergeant. As has been standard for the last month or so, I didn't use the bus but instead took the car across, allowing me to play and then leave.
We played twice, in the Grade 4B competition and then again playing up in Grade 4A. Both performances were okay, if not the very best of the season.
In Grade 4B we came 6th out of 13, being 6th in piping and 3rd in drumming. In Grade 4A, we were 4th out of 7, 5th for piping and 2nd for drumming. So a respectable result, but not a stellar one.
The final competition of the season, and my final competition with the band, will be tomorrow at Innerleithen. I'm looking forward to it... and looking forward to it being done, and another long, long season being over.
We've now reached Day 250 of the year, so it's time for another update on goals. Given the completion of the house move, we have a rather bigger update this time!
So that's one huge goal completed, and another that was abandoned. The rest are in reasonably good shape, all apart from the weight goal, which is just a disaster. So, a fairly positive update all told.
I think I've now reached the conclusion that if you're going to support a football team, it should be the (professional) team closest to at least one of the homes you have lived in. So, for me, the choice would be between Clyde, (Yeovil), Falkirk, or Livingston. (I could probably also get away with Airdrie, on the grounds that they were the closest until Clyde moved their stadium. However, given that they liquidated and then came back...)
An exception would, of course, make sense if there was a personal link to some other club - if, for instance, a family member had played for a given club some time in the past. Which doesn't apply in my case.
In the event that Tadpole decides that he or she wants to support a team, then I'll troop along to the games as required. Though the fact that it would have to be to Almondvale to support Livingston might prove a useful disincentive...
Money has pretty much destroyed professional football. The big problem is that the reward for success is large amounts of money, and the route to success is to spend large amounts of money. So, almost inevitably, leagues are rapidly becoming divided into the 'haves' and 'have nots' - where the 'haves' are those with regular access to the Champions' (sic) League.
(It's most notably in countries where only one club has such access, of course - it's not Celtic's problem that they are so far ahead of everyone else in Scottish Football, but it's a big problem for our domestic game and is only going to get worse.)
But probably what bemuses me most about the professional football these days are the absurdly inflated transfer fees... not for the top players, who of course will always attract a massive premium, but rather the absurd fees that are now paid for fairly mediocre players.
Anyway...
I would like to suggest three small(-ish) changes that I'd like to see, and that I think would make a fairly significant contribution to improving the game overall:
The net effect of all of this will be that the market for the very top players (Ronaldo, Neymar, etc) will go crazy (well, crazier), but that the market for everyone in the second tier will suddenly lose a lot of heat - no longer will the biggest clubs seek to just sign up any and all players of quality (and then loan most of them out), but instead they'll fight tooth and claw for the few players right at the apex. And clubs that currently rely on players loaned from those biggest global clubs will now (a) not be able to rely on those loans, but also (b) will be able to actually sign some of those players (since they're of less use to Man City, Real Madrid, and the like, so the 'value' will be less, and the fee will then be manageable.)
Oh, and is also means that smaller clubs won't be descended on in January by richer-but-underperforming clubs and have their top players ripped away.
Or we could just carry on as we are, with transfer fees nudging £200M for the best (how long until that is £1B? 2030?), the game becoming skewed entirely in favour of the biggest clubs, and the whole thing rapidly becoming unaffordable for the fans.
