2007 — 7 October: sunny Sunday
Time now (09:12) and the brekkie/meds routine is under way, to the sound of Scheherazade (excellent performance). I've even updated my classical listing. But, what I want to know is where the devil did I put the DVD of "Ab Fab" series 3 that She chortled Herself to sleep over last night? Between 11 pm (when I gently removed the DVD from the player and the player from Her grasp) and now, the thing has managed to vanish.
Mystery solved when we started making the bed!
Some time later...
Good grief! The time is now 17:50 and a lovely piece of Bartok has just started on BBC Radio 3. What happened in the gap?
Let's see. Numerous phone calls, three letters to write, some (quite a lot of) clothes to sort out since my new waist size renders them rather less suitable. Nice savoury beef mince and veg for the main meal. Several cups of tea. An update to the Open Office software on the WinXP box and over 106MB worth of security and other patches to the Ubuntu Linux half of the other WinXP box. More than a tad of the DSA Theory Test questions1 revision. Some essential desk tidying. A couple of short naps (very beneficial, I assure you). Hand delivering the next repeat prescription to the surgery. Trying the same with the health insurance company since they are just down the road (in exactly the office where Christa worked in the early 1990s, as it happens) but finding no security guard available.
Don't laugh, but one of my occasional readers even suggested I set up an RSS feed. Having looked into this, I suspect it will be a lot easier just to install, say, WordPress and do it that way. Investigation will continue.
A wiser man than I... department
I don't imagine JB Priestley is quite so much read these days. But this paragraph from his reminiscences "Margin Released" (1962) rang very true to me when I stumbled across it a few minutes ago:
Although we often feel we are outside our time, looking on and wondering, it is all we seem to possess with any certainty. Whether we believe we are immortal spirits, here in exile for a season, or see ourselves as talking mammals, cleverer than any box of monkeys, almost ready to take confusion and despair to another planet, our time is all we have on earth. For each one of us, in just so many hours, sunlight and opportunity vanish forever. Fed with the necessary data, a computer could work it out in a flash. (Our great-grandchildren will probably be working for the computers: already some of our technologists are on their side, not on ours.)