Why the Balloon and Needle?

For someone whose main propensity is writing, blogging is an inevitability.

But writing - blogging - must have some purpose if it is not to be mere vanity, and in my musings that purpose usually is to prick the balloon of some currently popular, gaseous notion.

When my daughter and I were in London recently, we noted the intriguing names of pubs, like The Eagle and Child, the quaint meeting place of C.S. Lewis and his literary cronies, the Inkspots, in Oxford. We delighted in making up absurd names of fictitious pubs, like The Slug and Lettuce, The Spill and Sponge, The Plug and Drain, and The Balloon and Needle.

So this blog, to me, is the virtual equivalent of a cosy, Tudor pub somewhere in the Cotswolds, where, in front of a snapping fire and over a half-pint of foaming ale, a few friends may swap eclectic musings while the sharp, West wind howls harmlessly without.