I was twice-forewarned as I crashed down through a thicket behind the hamlet's church: a beetle impaled on a long thorn; nearby, a bee, still buzzing frantically, had suffered the same fate.
Where: The outdoor theatre, a gorgeous spot at the corner of the festival in a thicket of palms.
Bresciano's entry into the national set-up, in 2001, little-remarked at the time, coming as it did amid a thicket of Australian-born talent plying their trade in the elite leagues of England, Spain and – as in his case – Italy.
Labour did much to reduce poverty, but little to stop the growth and sprawl of the welfare state.A thicket of entangled benefits has sprung up, compared by some to Japanese knotweed.
And President Jacques Chirac's popularity is in free fall: it is just 24%, says TNS-Sofrès, the lowest in his ten-year presidency.Treading a path through this thicket, Mr de Villepin this week announced surprisingly detailed measures to create jobs.
And as demand for quality housing increased the unintended consequences of the thicket of building regulation that had grown up in most cities became apparent.David Ricardo, an eminent early-19th-century economist who was, among other things, a friend of Malthus's, would have recognised the issue.
Rumour has it that the disappointed Muqrin has not gone unrecompensed.The thicket of committees in which decisions used to be made or left unmade has been replaced with two overarching councils that put power in the hands of the new Crown Prince and his cousin and deputy.
Already there are reports of companies arranging themselves so that they will never have more than 19 employees.The biggest problem for small businesses is the thicket of minor legislation.
What then?One path through the thicket, raised by Justice Sotomayor and pushed by Michael Dreeben, the deputy solicitor general, would be to permit police to access only data stored on the phone itself rather than what's on the "cloud", or as she put it, using Apple's proprietary nomenclature, "the iCloud".
In 2007 the EU was poised to transfer a thicket of crime-fighting and policing laws from one section of the union's treaties (in which individual countries have national vetoes and ECJ judges may not meddle) to a section of the treaties governed by majority voting and ECJ oversight.
The unprepared visitor to Glasgow looks in vain for teeming tenements blackened still by grime and soot, and searches an empty skyline for the thicket of cranes that rimmed the cacophonous shipyards.
