Kenny Rogers to walk away

Sad news from MegaCountry. Kenny Rogers is retiring:

Rogers, 77, said that has accomplished everything he wanted to achieve as an artist and that he wanted to spend more time with his children, including his 11-year-old twins.

“I’m sure I will miss it,” he said when discussing his retirement. “I swore that I would do this until I embarrassed myself. And I’m getting to where I don’t walk around well … my mobility’s really driving me crazy.” Later in the Today segment, Rogers stated that he felt that he owed the fans who've supported him for so long the chance to say goodbye during the world tour, and that he plans to "go out with a flurry."

Isn't a "flurry" kind of underpowered for a farewell? You might not want to go out with a bang, but a flurry seems only a step up from going out with a shower.

Glastonbury 2013: It's all over bar the abandoned tents making a mockery of the festival's attempts to be green

From a long, long way away, that looked like the best Glastonbury in quite a while - especially if you put a hand over one eye and ignore the over-freighted Rolling Stones bit.

Sure, it edged ever closer into the belly of the establishment:

Delivering his regular Sunday morning press conference at 11am today (June 30), Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis confirmed that Prince Harry attended the festival on Saturday.

The 77-year-old farmer and festival organiser revealed that he told the royal he should stay up all night to get the best of the event: "I recommended that he should go through the night, because the nightlife is really what Glastonbury is all about," said Eavis.

Well, no, Michael; visits from heirs to the throne seem to be closer to what Glastonbury is all about these days.

Mind you, you've got love Eavis' apparent unawareness about Harry's reputation:

"At three in the afternoon, you won’t get it, will you? So I told him to get his taxi driver to come back at five in the morning and, you know what, he lasted until four in the morning, so he saw all the best stuff," he said.

Michael Eavis is the only person left alive who'd be surprised that Harry held his end up until the small hours of the morning.

Harry left eventually, though, mumbling that he didn't want to be around when Mumford And Sons turned up as "they make me feel common."

I'm not sure that Uli Jon Roth out the Scorpions coming on stage during the Smashing Pumpkins set made anything better, but it was probably the most inspired collaboration of the weekend. Except for that bit when it wasn't entirely clear if Kenny Rogers had just hallucinated having Sheena Easton on stage.

But I think we can agree that The XX won Glastonbury this year, yes?

Four hundred children and a crook in the field

It's that time again, which comes round every few years, when English people pretend to be interested in rugby as there's a possibility of winning something. Hours of fun can be had asking people wearing the shirts "remind me... is this union or league?"

As part of the exciting build-up to a world cup final in a sport most people won't give a second thought to for another three years, eleven months and three weeks, there's the exciting news that, if England win, Kenny Rogers has offered to do a private gig for them. But only if they win - presumably Rogers doesn't want to associate with a bunch of losers.

It's not quite as out-of-the-blue as it might seem - apparently, the rugby players have been singing The Gambler in the dressing rooms. One of the rugby players, called Matthew, was strumming it on his guitar, when other rugby players - possibly including men called Rory, Edward and, oh, I don't know, Curly or something - took the song up as something of an unofficial theme tune.

We know that somewhere in offices in London, at least six different music business impresarios are thinking "hey... what a great idea for a single..."

You've got to know when to hold 'em

Who would have guessed that living next to Kenny Rogers would be a nightmare? It turns out that he's been busily redeveloping a plot of land with all the daintyness of a drunken hippo with a chainsaw:

Cathy and Alan Gottlieb, whose house is behind Rogers' property, said the months of demolition, tree-cutting and groundshaking granite blasting was irritating enough.

But worse, they say, the work has transformed the view from their back deck from dense woods to a dirt mound.

“We all understand people have to develop lots, but to strip the land like this is crazy,” Alan Gottlieb said. “He had a landscape plan that if he would've followed, would've been great. But he just decided to abandon it.”

Kenny Rogers suggests that he really couldn't give a hoot, but doesn't want to sound rude:

“I'm sorry for any inconvenience I might've caused them,” he said. “I tried desperately to be considerate to everyone out there, but you can't live your life for other people.”

Rogers had planned to live in the house, rather than rip the place to pieces and sell at a massive profit, but apparently decided to flog the house after realising that it'd be too large for his family to cope with "if anything happened to him." Which seems an odd basis for a decision about where to live - taken to an extreme, you'd only need a one-bedroom flat with space for a single divan as what's the point in having room you won't need if the husband falls into a threshing machine?