"There's some rum thoughts going on inside that lad's head" said Mr. Ravenscroft.

Well, a day so hot and humid that you can't sit still for more than a couple of minutes or you find yourself in a puddle. After that it makes perfect sense, of course, to go running in the still-oppressive evening heat. Or pace running, even. I'm glad to say that the afterglow is rather lovely, in fact, because otherwise there wouldn't have been a lot to recommend it. "Ah!" you say, "surely the point of running is the challenge, and without suffering there is no challenge?"

No. The point of running is that moment when you suddenly feel like you're flying, because the ground is just shooting by under your feet and you could go on like that for ever and ever and you aren't flying because you're almost part of the ground but there's no suffering and no effort at all. And that happens more often than you might think. Bloody hard work a lot of the rest of the time, though.

The last couple of times out I've been listening to a Julian Cope playlist on shuffle while I run; I had feared that this wouldn't work too well, and that I'd get too much Autogeddon turgidity and not enough Jehovahkill transcendence, but quite the opposite, in fact. Plus when you're listening to someone singing "to penetrate the diamond the pituitary gland gets torn off its axis and leaves" it's hard to think that what you're doing might be construed as daft.

Speaking of the Archdrude, on a recent perusal of his website (http://www.headheritage.co.uk/) I discovered what has instantly become one of my all time favourite insults. It is this:
"fender-less eunuch".
I hope I need say no more, but for me this just gets funnier and cleverer the more I think about it; there's a whole world-view wrapped up in that. The recipient, incidentally, was a charming radical Muslim who had been explaining how we in the West needed to "fix our women". Because they dress like whores, that sort of thing. Now, I think this epithet works exceptionally well when applied to this sort of "clerical knobshiner", as Copey also, exquisitely, refers to him, but need surely not be restricted to this use. If Julian Cope didn't exist it would be impossible to invent him.