Random Jottings

1. Do "womb" and "tomb" rhyme in any other language? I don't know the French for womb but I'm pretty certain it's not "wombeau". 

2. I love it how in Canto 2 of Don Juan Byron introduces this character you think is going to serve as the hero's lovable sidekick and then immediately arranges for him to be eaten. 

3. A magazine at the checkout counter had a headline that read "Try the 45 Minute Orgasm". Ailz turned to the woman behind her and said, "Sounds life-threatening" and the woman replied, "I try to avoid things like that, cos when you get credit you have to pay them back."

4. An early girlfriend of Paul McCartney's described him as "a spoiled little Medici prince". I don't suppose forty more years of adulation have humbled him any.  By the way I see (courtesy of the aforementioned checkout counter) that he's now dating one of the Guinness girls.

Matlock Bath

Coming back from Newstead the other day, we stopped for a meal at Matlock Bath. I thought I was being clever describing it as a seaside town that has been carried inland and dropped off in the middle of nowhere but- according to the website-  that's how it strikes everybody. It started off as an 18th century spa (my man Byron loved it) and now it's this weird-ass holiday resort in a narrow river gorge with a half-moon crescent of gift-shops and restaurants and ice cream parlours tucked in under the cliff. For some reason it's become a bikers town (think leather-grandads not Hell's Angels) and when we arrived around six o'clock the parking places were all chokka with their gleaming mounts and we wound up parking  on double yellow lines (which we're allowed to do because we've got a blue disabled parking badge.) We ate at an Italian pizzeria that was set back from the road and had a back room carved out of the living rock.  Ailz had calzone made with freshly home-made pizza dough and I had spaghetti with baby clams and it  was all very, very good.