The Green Goblin Blog

You know how thoughts link together like a long chain until you wonder why you are thinking what you are thinking....

Well, the other day I (finally) picked up am Absolutely Fabulous video from a workmate and spotted Joanna Lumley on the cover (not surprisingly). This always conjures up memories of Purdey and The New Avengers.



Which immediately links into Latin hymns being sung at school in Portsmouth Cathedral in the late 70s. Obviously you would have had to be there... so here it is for those who weren't:

Personent hodie
14th century

1. personent hodie
voces puerulae,
laudantes iucunde
qui nobis est natus,
summo Deo datus,
et de virgineo ventre procreatus.

2. in mundo nascitur,
pannis involvitur
praesepi ponitur
stabulo brutorum,
rectum supernorum.
Purdey's tit spolia princeps infernorum.

3. magi tres venerunt,
parvulum inquirunt,
parvulum inquirunt,
stellulam sequendo,
ipsum adorando,
aurum, thus, et myrrham ei offerendo.

4. omnes clericuli,
pariter pueri,
cantent ut angeli:
advenisti mundo,
laudes tibi fundo.
ideo gloria in excelsis Deo.

Sadly, Emlyn Hughes has died today at the age of 56.



Spent the 79/80 season at Wolves when they won the League Cup and finished 6th in the Original First Division.

Highlight of my day was meeting John Morganti at the "Boothby Graffoe" gig at 21 South Street. John and I used to be in the same tech support team at Microsoft about 10 years ago. Great bloke; left after a year or two but maybe regrets that. He told me tonight that he still lives be a rule I taught him - "the customer is either wrong or lying". I was so proud. I had achieved something with my life - my words of wisdom were starting their slow, steady progression into history and in so doing, creating a form of immortality for me.

Another StupidO'Clock trip from Heathrow - this time to sunny Munich to talk MSMQ to Munich Re (very nice people - free lunches!). Had to get up at 4:10am to get to the customer for noon so I was sitting on the 7am plane watching the sun slowly coming up thinking "what on Earth am I doing at this time in the morning?"

Having a digital camera on a plane has made me a great collector of nephograms (that's photographs of clouds to you and me).  The purity of the image is something that is so hard to catch on the ground. It is so easy to take a photo of trees in the woods, for example, and afterwards see a coke can you hadn't noticed before. At 35,000 feet you just get the clouds - even if the land would be visible through a gap, it's too hazy to distract from the overall beauty.

It's that time again. Dave Jones has gone. His time ran out - the results never came. The board has been able to hide their incompetence behind the sacking of the manager. Ah well, another 3-4 years of new management. Jones went the same week as McGhee (6 years ago) - the next match we smashed Bristol City 6-1 and almost made the playoffs (3 pts away). Taylor went a week later (9 years ago) - we almost got relegated (3 pts away). Lee lasted until mid-December (4 years ago) - we stumbled to mid-table. So, no easy way to tell what's going to happen by the end of the season.