Peter Capaldi does his impression of Malcolm Tucker

Mike's Pith & Wind - It never rains..
First up, I must apologise for the lateness of Mike’s P&W and as a consequence the April issue of The Bloody Newsletter. As you might appreciate, especially if you write your own blog or column, constantly coming up with interesting and appealing subject matter is demanding and especially so for me when gigs are thin on the ground as I don’t tend to get about a lot in down-time. Also, when we’re not gigging as regularly, the publishing deadline becomes less of an imperative
Anyway, after the events of last night, the question of what to write about changed rather dramatically - but let me take you back to where it all started.
For a couple of days last week I had the luxury of a gardener coming in, mainly to tackle the blackberry that infests the space between the shed and the fence. He was an interesting fellow and liked a chat when he had his coffee and a fag. I got a call from him when I was in Camberwell on the second day saying, rather surprisingly, that he’d finished all he could and he was leaving the hose dripping on the cumquat tree. When I arrived home I found that in the process he’d accidentally pulled the tap from the wall and it was leaking (significantly) from where the tap joined the pipe.
There wasn’t much I could do about it apart from attempt to re-attach the tap to the wall and hope the leak might subside. It didn’t. I had a brainwave and closed off the hose nozzle and turned on the tap – and the leak stopped. I thought that would probably tide.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Loaves and fishes..
It has been an Easter tradition down at the caravan park that there is annual Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes each Good Friday. Each year the men obtain fish, assorted molluscs and crustaceans, and turn them into a feast for about twenty people. This year spaghetti marina was the main course - a dish apparently popular in the Middle East at the beginning of the first millennium.
Things started well. As the fish section of the Victorian market opened early on Thursday morning I was there purchasing $140 of seafood amongst the quite moderate throng at six o’clock and then drove down to Torquay with a wife and two cats, one of whom is blind but was not driving, which logically means that the cat is vision impaired and I was at the wheel. Fortunately the traffic was benign, relatively sparse and the trip uneventful.
After that, everything went a little pear.. read more