may you never make your bed out in the cold

As of today it's a pretty busy week for celebrity deaths: as well as John Updike a couple of other interesting people have hopped the twig and joined the choir invisible in the last couple of days:

• John Martyn, legendary folk/rock/jazz/blues maverick, who died yesterday aged 60. Not totally surprisingly given his recreational habits and the fact that he'd had his right leg amputated in 2003, but sad all the same. A brutally honest appraisal of his musical output would coinclude that 1980's harrowing post-divorce album Grace And Danger was his last really good album, but most musicians would give their right arms (or indeed right legs) for a sequence of albums as good as the one that goes from 1971's Bless The Weather through the seminal Solid Air (no self-respecting record collection is complete without it) to the wildly experimental Inside Out, Sunday's Child, the ganjatastically funky One World and Grace And Danger.
• Bill Frindall, Test Match Special's statistical guru. Slightly more unexpected as he was, as far as I know, in perfectly good health before contracting legionnaire's disease while on a trip to Dubai. As I've said before, cricket provides a wealth of arcane statistical data like no other sport, and Frindall was the ultimate fount of knowledge for all of it. You wanted to know how many bowlers had taken a wicket in their first over on a Tuesday in June while wearing red underpants, the Bearded Wonder would know.

Incidentally "fount of knowledge" is a commonly misused phrase apparently, and in fact one of those where the usage of the incorrect form ("font of knowledge") is outstripping usage of the proper one. Pull yourselves together, everyone.