2007 — 17 Feb: time to feed the cats

Not ours,¹ I hasten to add. We have struck a deal with our neighbours opposite, who — in addition to serving a fine mug of Assam — maintain an open bungalow policy for five felines (though, come feeding time and their excited milling around, it seems like more of the furry purry lumps).

They (not the cats) are taking a brief but well-deserved break over in France, though not in the green² 2CV despite its recent triumph in the exhausting MOT event. The deal is a day of minor cat-tending in return for the stinkiest cheese they (not the cats) can find during their wine (and cat food!) cruise trip in the next 24 hours. Nor is the cheese for me, I equally hasten to add. But it's better than some of Her frankly intolerable salami,³ trust me.

Time to plan

I no longer need to plan, which is just as well as I no longer seem to have any time. But a piece in today's Guardian made me laugh:

Books from the 70s on time management⁴ always make two key suggestions... close the door to your office and get your secretary to screen your phone calls. This would be brilliant advice, except I don't have a door; I'd get my secretary to go and buy one, but I don't have a secretary either.

As a result, I am extremely busy, and regrettably have no time to take what would be the most cathartic action — ie, hunting down and killing the person who first suggested that open-plan offices might be a boon to productivity.

Oliver Burkeman

Nothing from Mr Postie, alas

Well, nothing for me, at least. But yesterday's time-wasting in town did yield the following morsel from Orson, so all's Welles that ended etc.

The Lady from Shanghai made in 1948, the one with the "hall of mirrors" climax and Rita Hayworth (Welles' wife at the time) as a short-haired blonde rather than the long-haired redhead who was then the American Forces' pin-up.
The DVD also contains an excellent little feature by Peter Bogdanovich. (I can still remember being marched out of his excellent film The last picture show in the Sutton Coldfield cinema in 1971 by my late uncle Tom, who claimed to be outraged by its content, style and moral tone.)

Bob Harris strikes again: Strawberry Fields is 40 years old today!

Day 106

Footnotes

¹  We had a lovely pair of ginger tom kittens once, yclept Tigger and Tiger. As they grew, like all adolescents, they started hanging out with undesirable fellow travellers, specifically, multiple fine strapping specimens of Ctenocephalides felis. These — when not laying eggs at a rate unseen since Shary Flenniken's cartoon "Wretched Chicken" [Dope Comix, 1972] — invariably made a flea-line for me leaving me with decorative anklets of bite marks. To my son's distress, I decided it was them (the fleas) or me.
²  A missed opportunity if you ask me. They tell me children in France must be immediately slapped on the head for luck if they see green objects, such as a car.
³  Now that I've just devoured the Wikipedia entry on salami I'm even more of the opinion that the only fit place for it is hanging on the wall in Don Camillo's Little World, whether being used to disguise a machine gun or not.
⁴  I have very nearly finished reading the one I bought in February 1985 ("Time management made easy" by P Turla and KL Hawkins).