While swimming at Climping this afternoon my attention was drawn towards what appeared to be a jet aircraft in the distance flying abnormally low. This turned out to be a South African Airways 747 coming straight at me at about 100ft, with no apparent engine power. I swam for the shore, gesticulating and shouting, and then scarpered up the beach to reach the safety of our small family group as the presumably stricken aircraft lurched past, heading for Barnham. We lost sight of it as it dipped below the treeline and I assumed it was about to crash land and waited for the fireball. Then, it reappeared, and circled around the area a few times, gaining a little height before losing it again. A bloke edged close to us and said the aircraft was only just above stall speed as it had come past. I started thinking ‘terrorists’, or maybe ‘jettisoning fuel’ before I remembered the Goodwood Fesitival of Speed. By this time, the 747 had begun to do some serious acrobatics. Sure enough, a quick google search on our return home showed up a load of blog entries telling the world about an ‘awesome’ display over Goodwood by a SAA ‘nutter’ pilot.

The other highlight at the beach was some ageing lothario – who I remember from last year, too – oiling about the place in an all over Kilroy Silk tan, wearing a hideous pouchlike, thong-backed affair through which he could flash his bronzed buttocks at all and sundry. When he wasn’t doing this, he was scrutinising other beach residents with his powerful binoculars, no doubt chortling at the ludicrous acreage of their swimsuits.

A beautiful day largely spent hedge cutting was followed by a spiffing evening at Climping swimming in the balmy waters of the Channel. Most invigorating. The icing on the cake was to hear that Australia had lost to Bangladesh. Hopefully, tomorrow will be hotter still, and England will win their game. Who needs to go to Tenerife? (Well, I do, actually, since I’m sure the sea is cleaner and the beaches sandier.)

Mushroom PIE
You scored 21 childishness and 27 evilosity!
Jolly serious and down to earth, well often under the earth in the case of mushrooms, I guess. That’s your PIE and that’s you. You probably enjoy gardening, come to think of it.

The Sunday Times had an interview with Richard Gere, who is a Buddhist. After trying in vain to establish any individual traits whatsoever, outside of a general blandness, the journalist concluded:

“I’ve found it almost impossible to locate even the mildest tic or mannerism on which to hang his character. Decades of meditation have almost entirely polished away his personality. Richard Gere is a great big nobody. You see him, but he’s not really there.”

He then added:

“Writing this some days after I met him, I find this faintly chilling .”

It’s an anagram of Nagin, an individual member of the Nagi. The Nagi are shamen, masquerading as a species of crow. One of their kind visited us yesterday, on the pretext of raiding a nesting pigeon. I sent him – or her – packing with the sound of one hand clapping.

Enlightenment is too ‘last year’. How about:

Is Your Church on the Cutting Edge?
Or
How cynical are you?
Or again
How competetive are you?

All at the same Beliefnet.com site, along with about a hundred other inane quizzes, including one on the Matrix.

This question just about sums it up:

Q6. There are 30 seconds left in a really good football game that’s going down to the wire. The network breaks into the game for a news bulletin about hostage negotiations in Kazakhstan. You:
1. Go berserk and scream at the TV.
2. Race to the radio to see if you can pick up the play-by-play.
3. Hope they get through the news bulletin quickly.
4. Pause to pray for the hostages.