Well, like many others, we are cooling down after the excitement of the Eurovision contest yesterday evening during which we spent a couple of hours making mild bets and critiquing this anachronistic European television.
As Brits, we've had plenty of years of Irish-voiced commentary to absorb and although Graham Norton rang the changes, the jibes were similar to his predecessor.
There is no clear criteria for selecting the winning entry. It doesn't seem to be song, musicianship, performance or any of the more obvious reasons and even the political bloc-voting of the 42 counties was somewhat less-predictable. I suppose it is just a question of making sure that bookies' favourite gets sufficient votes to ensure a return.
The Norwegian winners had several of the right ticks. It seems that violins were important and they did this well. I know the lead singer Alex Rybok was originally from Minsk, Belarus, but hey, it's within a days flight of Norway.
The British entry hovered around the fifth position, somewhat upstaged by the surrounding entries which had glowing nuclear reactors on stage in one case and hordes of woodland faerie nymphs in another.
Our singer and Lordly pianist combo was a trifle staid by comparison, with no sudden wardrobe changes although singer Jade did get a violinist's elbow in her eye.
The Germans tried adding Dita von Teese, who is no stranger to wardrobe malfunction but despite their most spectacular use of glitter, were unable to get any half decent score.I suppose I quite enjoyed the Iceland, Azerbaijan and Turkish entries, more because they typified Europop, although try as I might, the fairyland winner just didn't appear on my shortlist.
And it seems I wasn't alone, judging from the robust twittering occurring during the event, on a separate couple of #channels created just for the purpose.
