Ληκυθιον απωλεσεν

You'll have to blame the human for the title, I'm afraid, as he's been a little obsessed with Aristophanes since spending most of last week boning up on obscure works of criticism in the British Library.

"Ληκυθιον απωλεσεν"; "Lost his bottle of oil," I hear you say? Who? Surely not Euripides? Not according to his wife at least... Google it and you'll find plenty of hilarious commentaries going to great lengths to elaborate what the phrase doesn't mean.

The human is back for a final week in Aquae Sextiae and tying himself in terrible knots about packing to head back to Terra Australis Incognita. One of the more amusing things to watch has been the weighing of books to post back by seamail--the post office will only accept packages of 5kg maximum, even though it seems to cost less the more packages one sends in the same postal bag. With any luck he'll even get to keep the bags at the other end, so I can have somewhere abit bigger and a bit more summery to live than my stripy sock.

Weighing books reminds me all too much of the wonderful weighing-of-words contest between Euripides and Aeschylus in the latter part of Aristophanes' Frogs, though this worries me for my own sake. Aeshcylus tipped the scales by piling

Εφ’ αρματος γαρ αρμα και νεκρωι νεκρος
Chariot upon chariot, corpse upon corpse

into a single line of verse, whereas the postcard and I only weigh 14 grams...

Perhaps, like Euripides, that's what you get for breaking the rules. Damned agelastic classicists with no sense of humour!

Goon gymnastics

And this, Gentle Reader, is just to assure you that I have been getting plenty of exercise despite all this talk of food and drink.

I'll leave those unacquainted with the cultural significance of goon to discover for themselves...

It must, however be added, that such nectar is more usually drunk by means of gravity, by suspending the cardboard container from a Hills Hoist and lying underneath while trying to take both centrifugal force and the coriolis effect into account.

XXXX en Provence

The murky and occasionally mammary home-made stout of previous entries has finally been christened, thankfully avoiding the grievous wastage of alcohol that would have occurred had we tried to smash the bottle against a drinker's head in the traditional manner.

The name XXXX en Provence is in part my answer to the appalling puns seen in so many local business names: Aix et Terra selling overpriced regional specialties, Aixtreme tattoo and piercing (so hardcore, in fact, that they omitted the circumflex...), Aixprit bicycles, and so on. Easily a match for Sydney's collection of terrible Thai restaurant puns.

It's also a reference, of course, to XXXX (four-ex), the iconic and truly awful lager from Queensland, Australia, rumoured to have originated from the locals' inability to spell the word "beer". (Complaints from Queenslanders are welcome and will be dealt with on the comments page below.)

I like all the designs really, though am leaning towards the one on the left if only for its gesture to the sign of the double cross in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

I won't be able to bring any of the batch back to Australia, but may try to make a new lot once there, so further label suggestions are most welcome.

The milk of canine kindness, or How to appear classy while drinking Catalan champagne from the bottle in the freezing cold

Romulus and Remus have turned up rather a lot in the last couple of weeks, from Christmas spent in Aquae Sextiae with excursions to Massilia, and thence for a few days via the Viae Aurelia and Domitia through the province of Gallia Narbonensis and on to Matritum.

I seem to recall them being invoked during the audioguide tour to the Arena in Nemausus, whose French commentary for some reason invoked Seneca and whose English commentary made do with much tut-tutting about how it was the wicked Christians who gave gladiator fighting a bad name. Go the lions, I say!

But I digress.

The photograph jogged hazy memories of catching up on New Year's Eve in Tarraco, in a province whose preferred language only seems to require a moderate amount of good cheer and gesticulation for reasonable intercomprehension with the southern Gauls.

I maintain (though I fear the humans I was chaperoning may not) that sharing a drink with one's fellow creatures is always a worthwhile activity regardless of the consequences the next morning. Happy new year to you all, fellow drinkers of Cava just in time for midnight in front of the clock tower!

Was it not Lady Macbeth who lacked the milk of human kindness?

And was it not Romulus and Remus who accepted the offer of a drink from an unsung she-wolf, and went on to found Rome?

There's a lesson for you somewhere there, humans. I'm sticking by the medicine of my old mate Alcofribas.

Behold the hipposphinx!

The year is ending, the human is soon to drag me back to the antipodes, and I've finally taken advantage of having guests for a few days to visit the Iles de Frioul, off Marseille. All in all an appropriate context for an appointment with destiny...

My human consorts were for some reason terribly excited by a local detective novel whose final showdown occurs during a whiskey-filled picnic on the same island; I should never have let them visit most of the bars where its early stages are played out.

So excited were they that I had to beg them to photograph me in front of what I hold to be conclusive proof of the antique dignity of my race: the Hipposphinx.

Just wait, humans, until its slow thighs get moving, and you get caught in a gaze as blank and pitiless as the Provençal sun...a rough beast indeed!

For once, I concede, Yeats may have been right.