2006 — Day 9 - cloudy, blustery, chance of showers
In other words, a perfect day for our trip to the Midlands, bearing the gift of Freeview! Perhaps if I use a credit card at the motorway "pit stop" my credit rating will rise to offset my drop in income?
I've been losing it steadily, obviously. The last batch of book shop fix got overlooked:
- Taking the Piss by Adam Hart-Davis, a potted history of pee. It basically grew (flowed?) out of his BBC radio programme about London's micturational history
- Strictly No! by Simon Hills. A lively examination of the Nanny State that endeared itself to me, not least, by a Mencken quote: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." A line whose descendant turned up in Aaron Sorkin's The American President
- How to get rich by "Oz" trial member Felix Dennis. He got a shorter sentence at the time, remember, since the judge decided he was less intelligent than his chums
- The very best of Linda Smith assembled by her partner Warren Lakin. Here's Linda on the divine Virginia Bottomley:
Now, the fact that there is a lot of sleazy exploitative rubbish on TV should hardly surprise Mrs B., as it was her own Government that introduced the legislation that caused it. Shocking, isn't it? You give people a licence to print money and they only use it to, er, print money. How disappointing it must be when Carlton TV, instead of producing a season of Chekhov plays featuring Vanessa Redgrave, come up with the 'How much blue fluff is there in your man's belly button?' game show with Vanessa Feltz.
Guess which one gets read during the trip today?
In later news
I took the piss, and (according to the policeman who had called round in the course of "knocking on doors" regarding a van theft a week earlier) the local Sutton Coldfield TV transmitter (albeit powerful) necessitates a wideband aerial (which in Mama's case, she 'as not got) because of the way I assume the digital channels are splattered all across the available range. But then the three-plug adapter I'd taken along (just in case) doesn't allow you to switch on her wall socket when it's plugged in (!), and the male to female aerial lead I'd also taken along (also just in case, of course) was lost on her as she perversely (no offence, cous) needs a male to male lead because the Sony set chooses to be different.
Winsome, lose some.