where the Demodex folliculorum are

Of all the various things learnt from biology textbooks over the years the existence of a beastie which inhabits eyebrows and eyelashes is one of those things which somehow manages to always be in mind. The original textbook entry didn't mention the eyebrows nor the tell-tale species name but just said that EVERYONE's eyelashes were infested with them and had everyone peering at their desk-neighbour's face for motile black dust. Something similar briefly cropped up in the novelisation of Alien³ as the reason why the inmates of the penal colony were all slappy-headed but I have otherwise never heard of them again though think of them often, including almost immediately when reading of the title of the current assignment. Luckily the paternal eyebrows were available for illustrating the site of infestation if not one of the actual creatures, apparently more common in the elderly.

Nothing booked for during the day so everyone just wandered around in the damp looking at things. I had another vague look for a better coat seeing as the knackered seams and sweat-inducement of my current oldcheap anorak make it little different from wandering about coatless but the only things on Sale! were complicated affairs with excessive amounts of strap and frippery about the neck which would make them unsuitable for feeling comfortable in or cycling. Saw some Scottish Chamber Orchestra in the evening which was all quite good except for the excessive head-bobbing posturing of the first violinist. He can't make the excuse that it's just something he does when he plays as he kept almost perfectly still for the second piece when Alfred Brendel and a piano were taking centre stage though he resumed after the interval and was especially smug and awful during the wee speech-bit at the end when the conducting Charles Mackerras was announced as the new honorary president of the EIF by the festival director and his unidentifiable accent. I've always been a bit WTF about conductors though this particular one has always seemed reasonably restrained in his bizarre gesturing though I would appreciate he and other conductors a lot more if they carried long sticks with which to admonishingly smite musicians deemed to be over-dramatising their wobbling and head-shaking like the first violinist today and a particularly egregious and smug-looking pianist we saw a few years back playing some Berlioz.