Poor old Church of England still chasing their tails over the question of women bishops. Sad really. Evidently a compromise suggestion is to have an alternative male bishop to cater to the conservative element who wants nothing to do with women bishops, so a see will have two bishops instead of one. I wonder if the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the church, will one day be a woman.
Air conditioning has been installed in my bedroom which I must admit, despite the conventional fan, could get just a wee bit on the warm side, especially in the afternoon, siesta time.
Then, would you believe it, immediately the weather turns a bit cooler with a cheery chilly breeze blowing down from somewhere up north rather than the heat wave from Africa. Still, I must admit it was comfortable having it on all night.
Been at the bookshelves again, it’s like the old Boots library, and read a biography of Crippin who evidently next to Palmer (prince of poisoners) and Jack the Ripper, (who he?) is the most written about murderer in criminal history. Why I wonder when one thinks of mass murderers and Crippin's sole killing was of his wife. Was it because he dismembered and decapitated her before burying the torso in the cellar? There have been other mutilations just as gruesome, the unsolved case of the Black Dahlia in Los Angeles for instance where the dismembered corpse was left in full view for the public to discover. Which brings me neatly to the next book – Hollywood Babylon – an exposé of the dark side of Tinseltown and fascinating reading it is. Apart from the mobsters, Joe Kennedy, sexual shenanigans, drugs, breakdowns, arrests and early deaths, the list of suicides is quite amazing; stars, directors, screen writers, artists, people who one wouldn’t think of as doing themselves in. There was the director James Whale about whom a film has been made starring Ian Mckellen, Gig Young, Linda Christian’s Chihuahua that apparently out of jealousy threw itself off the terrace of her Rome apartment in a “fit of canine despair” because she was paying too much attention to her toreros rather than to him, Pier Angeli, Charles Boyer, Dorothy Dandridge, Alan Ladd Carol Landis, Jean Seberg, George Saunders and of course Marilyn Monroe and that is just a selection of the better known names, apart from the poor demented love sick Chihuahua of course. And talking of Chihuahuas, in a damning revue of a Handel opera at the Royal Opera House (top price seats £240!) a singer’s voice is described as being like “a Chihuahua breaking wind in a hurricane.” Critics can really be so unkind.

Soon shalt thou hear the Bridegroom’s voice,
The midnight cry, ‘Behold I come!’ – Hymn by H.Bonar in the Public School Hymn Book.