Gareth Higgins is #14 in the list of exciting things at Greenbelt.

I was paining over this at the weekend:  not only because he was at Greenbelt and I wasn’t; but because others were excited about him being there and probably not many about me (the crowd of folk gathered round the tiny tea-tent, poring over their festival program muttering  “why did they not get Neil Glover this year?” was not a very large one.)

This was not easy to take, because Gareth, a some time contributor to this website (his "Jade Goody was scapegoated for all British Racism" caught what was going on during the Celebrity Big Brother scandal better than anything else I read on the subject) was living in Belfast when I was there, I enjoyed getting to know him, and though we were once together, now we are not.  He has been plucked from the mean vat of obscurity to be the 14^th thing to excite 2010's grateful Greenbelters, and for me, even if the list went into the 1000s, my name would not appear.

Simon Cowell is the "Karaoke Sauron", so quoth the elfin Marina Hyde in today's Guardian.

In a remarkable piece of Tolkien quote finding, she notes that Cowell in earlier series of X-Factor was like the second age Dark Lord "not yet wholly evil", "and was at first well-seeming and just and his rule was of benefit to all men in their needs of the body; for he made them rich, who so would serve him. But those who would not were driven into the waste places"; but since then Cowell has morphed into perfect amalgam of unlimited power and distilled malevolence: "that horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you: to pin you under its deadly gaze, naked, immovable".

There is something about myths that enable them to express the deepest truths.  Without the constraints of historical fact-checking, they can burrow down into the richest seams of experience, thought and soul.  This is why Tolkien hated the suggestion that Lord of the Rings was merely an allegory of the Second World War (Hitler = Sauron, Mussolini = Saruman, Sam and Frodo = the plucky Brits, Aragorn and the vast armies of the free = Patton's 3rd Army) - for him the work was so much bigger than that.