The Elizabethans used to have swearing contests - known as Flyteing. Contestants had to roundly insult their opponent without repetition for 3 minutes, they sit with equanimity while their opponent "flyted" them for 3 minutes. This would go on until one contestant repeated himself, became exhausted, or hit his opponent. They took place in pubs.

There's something similar among blacks in the States at the moment, invented as a replacement for violence, but I can't remember its name. Its related to rap and its main exponents are feted and awesome.

During these flyteing contests where repetition was disallowed was Nicholas Parsons the chairman?

"[P]rattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets"

Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais (trans. Thomas Urquhart

>Someone once told me they were sure they'd seen me sitting in the street in Totnes, busking with a sitar. As IF........
>

Ah, that most superb of South Western towns.

I really don't go there as much as I perhaps should.

I've only been to the train station, but it doesn't seem that special to me. Can you enlighten me? I am a bit biased towards East Devon, I must admit.

Where in East Devon?

I live in Honiton, but I have a particular fondness for Sidmouth, where I was born.

Ah, I'm Exeter myself.