So there I was, you see, flexing my fingers up and down the keyboard as I tried to get to grips with Tchaicovsky's 2nd Piano Concerto - no, really, I've always wanted to play it, and I'm getting there - when the neighbours from Curlew and beyond popped in. It's quite a tricky piano solo arragement (try as I might, Mrs C wouldn't be one hundred per cent happy if I invited the London Philarmonic down for the night) and I was beseeched for a performance of the work in progress. It didn't go too badly, in fact, but this being Newton, we careered off down another musically related path, and ended up jiving to Sir Elton's opera (as in opus, not as in Covent Garden) once again. Wonderful stuff it was that I dredged up from the record archives in my possession: a live recording of a concert in Madison Square Gardens, incorporating 'Funeral for a Friend', 'Love Lies Bleeding', 'Crocodile Rock' and many others. My old analogue hi-fi did the biz once again, and blasted sound down Mayfield Road suficiently loudly enough to encourage the dog to get her snout out of the phonograph. (Not that said snout was actually therein, you understand; I don't want the RSPCA on my back.)

It was The Concert tonight, and if you weren't there you missed the spectacle of the BTs banging their cymbals in front of a rapt audience. No, stop it: they really did cymbalise. You lot do have very suspect trains of thought, you know. (That's enough of the Frankie Howerd. Ed.)

I must go before euphemisms take over - and I've typed a load of those over the past few days:it's called report writing.

'This boy has all the characteristics of a tree stump, but he lacks the personality."

No, I wasn't the originator, and no, it never reached the unfortunate boy's parents. It was headmagisterially intercepted - and it was more than just cymbals that were clanging after that. It is good though, don't you think?

'night all.