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It is almost midnight, and I haven't blogged yet because we've been watching the Eurovision Song Contest.

Addendum  Right, that got today's date in the bag, otherwise if I hadn't pressed Publish until after 24:00 hours it would have been tomorrow's post.  It is rather late to be blogging, but there wasn't time earlier.  I let the chickens out for a run, and they didn't want to go back in until well after seven.  I was beginning to feel slightly pathetic as I crawled around pulling leaves and weeds out from under the hedge surrounded by happy hens while the evening got steadily cooler, and was relieved when suddenly the Systems Administrator arrived waving a long piece of bamboo and saying Right, two had gone in, where were the other two?

Then I did my back exercises, as I didn't do them yesterday, and after that there was only an odd ten minutes until the show began.

It took me a while to get my eye in, as I was so distracted by why the first contestant was wearing a pair of huge headphones that wouldn't have looked out of place on a sound engineer plus a dress that seemed to have been made out of a net curtain.  I didn't actually think the UK entry was that bad, but it wasn't that good either, distinctly sub Caro Emerald and not at all Eurovision.

I liked the Belgian entry best, although that was not at all Eurovision either, and the SA said that the Belgian wanted to be Kraftwerk when he grew up.  I wouldn't mind hearing the Belgian again, which is more than I could say for some of the others, but you don't really watch Eurovision for the quality of the music, more for the stage presentation, overall camp magnificence, and Graham Norton's snide comments.  I still don't understand why the Austrians set their piano on fire, or why the tattooed Latvian elf was stuck immobile inside that extremely peculiar red dress.  The Hungarian contestant had a sweet voice, not at all Eurovision but if she learned The Plains of Waterloo and Bonny Woodhall I reckon she could have a successful summer at the UK's folk festivals.  Conchita's couple of numbers were enough to remind me how difficult that kind of big emotional power ballad is to do well, and this year's voters were rightly dismissive of most of this year's efforts in the genre.  One or two of them didn't even meet the standard of Can dance a little. I was somewhat impressed and vaguely terrified by the enormous Serbian diva, and relieved that the solemn bespectacled Cypriot got some points, because he was sweet.

I don't understand why Australia was in it either.  Just because it's the sixtieth anniversary of the competition doesn't make Australia suddenly part of Europe, but never mind.  As the SA reminded me, it's Eurovision.  You're not supposed to understand it.