Short and curlies

It's Easter Saturday and this interlude in the busy biblical bustle of this long weekend means all you can really do is go for a drive and somehow work through the throng of drivers and shoppers at the nearest big store to escape brandishing sufficient reduced treats wrenched from the aisles to last till Tuesday.

Today's Guardian notes that changes in the law could mean this year might be last which has an Easter Sunday free of trade in the larger shops. It might be a sad loss of a British tradition if the actual process of getting about was not so exhausting due to the rush of people and marketing so that we can accomplish everything today. The good thing about Easter weekend for me is definitely that you can at least sit back and read damn nearly every article in the paper just like in the good old days, if they ever existed.

I'm pleased to see that a high-falutin’ paper like the Guardian hasn't trashed Manchester Passion as I feared it might, having in fact produced a review that reads in its basic appraisal rather like mine, although its fancy use of quotes has my feature over a barrel. It actually ends up by describing the evening's events as ‘truly transcendent’ and ‘really quite beautiful.’

One weakness of my version is that my description of the filming and production comes out more than a little geeky: focusing on the details of presentation and not on very much that would have escaped any viewer's attention. But hey, it's a blog so I can be a little geeky, right?

Once I've finished with my little Easter newspaper and TV rituals it'll be time for me to practice my shorthand again, having let it slide this week. For those of you keeping an eye on me out there (no one really, my visitors chart tells me, mais c'est la vie) I've almost finished Chapter 7 which features a rather fiendish 'translation' from shorthand notes which has sneakily linked up lots of little words together that weren't explained in the lessons. I'll just assume that the entire global community awaits my every word and let you all know how I'm doing over the next day or two.