Greetings! Our visit in the Parlour began with a stanza from this delightful little poem by a contemporary of William Shakespeare's, entitled "Spring the Sweet Spring":

Spring, the sweet spring is the year's pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing.
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
-Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)

And with that whimsical wordplay to set the stage, we played a brand new game called "A Song by Any Other Name".

I gave our guests the name of a well-known song - disguised cryptically - and they had ten seconds to work out the answer; when the countdown reached zero, everyone who thought they knew it could simply say it out loud.

See how many of the following song titles you can decipher (answers appear below):

1. A Utensil-measure of Sucrose
2. You Are Naught But a Borzoi
3. In a Non-Specific Place Beyond the Prismatic Arc in the Sky
4. S.O.S.!
5. Caravan Travellers, Vagrants and Robbers
6. Cobalt December Observance
7. Oriental Utensils
8. Pant, the Mystical Winged Lizard
9. Malevolent Crescent Ascending
10. The Benevolent Sloop Candy-on-a-Stick
11. Unhappy Napped-Leather Brogues
12. Crystallized Carbon Units are For Keeps
13. Lemon-coloured Hoagie
14. Scale Each Pike
(I thought that was tricky, with its dual imagery of removing the outer surface of a fish but our guests were *far* to clever to be duped!)

Sister Erato came up with these on the fly:
15. Girl in the Blue Beyond with Crystallized Carbon Units
16. Lunar Stream
17. Forlorn Building of Beds

And we finished the night with some very nice challenges posed by various guests:

18. Casual Greeting Saint of Lost Causes (Geb)
19. PMSing Ria (Sass)
20. Cent Street (DD of Narnia)

All in all it was a splendid time and we look forward to entertaining (and being entertained by) our visitors next time in the Morpheus Rose Garden East for more Diversions in the Formal Withdrawing Room Reserved for Special Occasions <w>

Answers:
1. A Spoonful of Sugar; 2. You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog; 3. Somewhere Over the Rainbow; 4. Help!; 5. Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves; 6. Blue Christmas; 7. Chopsticks; 8. Puff, The Magic Dragon; 9. Bad Moon Rising; 10. The Good Ship Lollipop; 11. Blue Suede Shoes; 12. Diamonds are Forever; 13. Yellow Submarine; 14 Climb Every Mountain; 15. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds; 16. Moon River; 17. Heartbreak Hotel; 18. Hey Jude; 19. Moody River; 20. Penny Lane.