I’ve been having a little bit of trouble with my ‘l’s lately. My new laptop seems to have a bit of a speech defect and cannot pronounce that letter without going into spasm. It’s been very inconvenient – I’ve had to resort to typing a 1 instead and then doing ‘find and replace.’ But now somehow, miraculously, the laptop seems to have healed itself, allowing me to speak to you using words with as many ‘l’s as I like. I could even write in Welsh if I knew any Welsh. Speaking of which, I had a weird crossword clue the other day which I thought might be Welsh. It went ‘Suggestion: somewhere to go in all seasons.’ Sometimes the answer is contained within the clue, as in this one, lower down: ‘Accordingly caught by better goalkeeper,’ to which the answer was ‘ergo’, the letters of which are contained in ‘bettER GO alkeeper.’ Just as well as I was originally thinking the answer was a goalkeeper and I don’t know any.
So, I was wrestling with the letters of ‘Somewhere to go in all seasons’ and wondering whether for some reason it could be spelled backwards. And I came up with Llaniog. Hm, Llaniog: I wonder if that’s a real place? It sounded familiar – and when I googled it I discovered it is the setting for Ivor the Engine.
You cannot imagine the sheer joy of being able to type Llaniog without your computer throwing a complete wobbly. Fantastic.
In other news, I am deeply sad about Andy Murray’s impending retirement. He is such a terrific player, has never had a tantrum or insulted anyone and has in his own understated way always stuck up for equality and fair play. It’s not even as if he’s overdone things; he just had this injury which won’t quit, so now he has to.
So that’s today’s offering, I’m afraid. A bit of a rag-bag with a smidgin of Welsh. Still it’s better than having a word-processor which only works in Swedish.
Kirk
Sarada Gray 