I’ve been madly trying to find some yarn which might knit together (i) this 950^th anniversary of the Norman landings on English soil* and battle at Hastings for the English crown** with (ii) The Swedish Academy’s award of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. I don’t think I can and it may seem trivial, anyway.

Apart, that is, from evolving culture.

The euphoric influence of Norman ideas in architecture, artistic flowering, language, military engagement and food began a thousand years of gradual refinement: attempting always to move forward in thinking and approach.

Alfred Nobel, a chap who made his millions from dynamite, did not expect his legacy to be as explosive as Bob Dylan qua Nobel Laureate appears to be. There have been hoots of protest that as a singer, he’s more of a poet and can either constitute literature?

Yet in order for there to be progress, should not thinking be free to dream, by which it climbs ever higher?

Culture is a vulture, siphoning up indiscriminately all within its reach, spitting out what’s unpalatable only after it has sucked it to see. It seems plausible to suppose that only by dropping the unexpected onto the unwitting can fresh dimensions be discovered.

* in fact, William et al arrived at Pevensey around the third week of September and had to wait for Harold to hot-foot it from Stamford Bridge [north of the Humber, not the far end of the Fulham Road] in order to claim one in the eye for France.

** Battle of Hastings, 14.x.1066

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And that was to have been the end of that Post. But for searching for a starry picture of Nobelfesten, the glitzy annual dinner following the award ceremony, having failed to find a fresh image of either Bayeaux Tapestry or Bob Dylan.

Nothing sprang out from the raft of images like the impossibly wonderful Einstein. This explains why he’s pictured above and why his words are featured here. Although uttered in 1945 〈he was awarded the Prize in 1921 for “services to theoretical physics〉, could they be more pertinent?