Thursday

I've made it down to Devon, via the Royal Academy to see the Cranachs, which was worth climbing all those stairs for -- I disdain to take the lift. I love his portraits, and his Venuses and Eves have this fantastic face, canny and amusing, like a bright WAG. Of course a fondness for Cranachs puts me in some pretty nasty company, but anyway, I've had quite enough of the Italian style recently, it's nice to see something more robust. What I didn't get, and I couldn't be bothered to shell out for the catalogue on the off-chance that it would explain, is how Cranach got to be the official portraitist to the Lutheran reformation, painting him several times and also his family and Melanchthon and complex allegorical woodcuts and such, but also got commissioned by the anti-Luther cardinal, I'm going to dredge wildly in the depths of my brain and call him Albrecht of Brandenburg, to paint portraits for the other side, including one of said Albrecht in his study as St Jerome. I checked the dates and they seemed roughly concurrent. I want a pacy, well-written biography of Cranach to sort this out for me. There ought to be a service, call it www.pacy-wellwritten-biography.org, where you can either track one down or order one written. Or the Literary Review should run a consultation service. As well as the Cranach biography I would ask them for a popular history of the Hanse, and something readable and narrative about the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

I had a lot of luggage so got a taxi to Waterloo, and got talking to the driver, an Iraqi bloke who had got his British passport just two days earlier. He had left Iraq at 16 and never gone back, meeting his parents just once in the ten years since in Iran. He was a nice youth; he complimented me on my wisdom for my young age and during the course of this it transpired that he estimated me to be 20. 20! Of course these things are a mixed blessing; I don't mind people thinking I'm 20, it makes me feel like they'll make allowances when I fail to function as a proper adult human being, but they only ever make that mistake because I'm overweight. It's the chubby cheeks; heigh ho. He was very nice about my Arabic accent, as well, which was rather sweet given that I can only remember about four words.

Dusk in Devon is amazingly beautiful. I was out for a trying reason tonight though. One of my parents' alpacas had her baby at lunch-time, rather earlier than my parents were expecting. This year they all start with H, and I lobbied for and achieved a Hereward. (I always try to get an Anglo-Saxon one in; we've had Beowulf, Cuthbert, Caedmon, Dunstan, and Edith among others.) But he wasn't suckling, and was finding it hard to stand for long. In the end I phoned my parents, who were out at a PCC, and got them to come home early and give him some plasma. Plasma is a bit wierd, being basically the spun pale part of blood given to them orally, but it perks up struggling alpaca babies no end. Hopefully tomorrow he can be sorted out properly. The difference between flourishing and failing to thrive, even fading out completely, is a very small one when they're so little. He's a dear soul, composed mostly of legs. He can walk for a bit, looking just like a four-legged spider, but then he gets tired and has to flop down.

After all I did find We're the Pet Shop Boys, the Pet Shop Boys cover of the My Robot Friend song, on YouTube, with a fan-made video that's a selection of clips from official PSB videos. I do like the low-grade poignancy of the original though.