2008 — 5 Feb: Tuesday, and spectacularly dull

Once again, an earlier night leads (it seems) to a poor night's sleep and a relatively sluggish start to the (dull-looking) day. It's already 10:05 and the first cuppa has yet to work its magic. The mood is lightened a little, however, by receiving from the funeral director the list of people who very kindly donated to the hospice in which Christa died.

Christa, March 2007

Thank you, all, from both of us! (This picture was taken in the evening on 31st March last year. Big Bro and #1 niece were with us that weekend, and we drove them down to Lepe country park the following day for one of our [many] seaside days.)

Later that same day...

Nothing to report, yet, apart from the heavy shower now washing my roof tiles! I'm not even undressing-gowned.

Good grief!... dept.

I have nothing by the economist John Maynard Keynes in my little library. But I now learn that, like Samuel Pepys, he wrote some of his diaries in code that has yet to be cracked. I'm not certain I'm a better person for this knowledge, but I am (as ever) bemused by the prurience in academia!

Elsewhere on the same web site, this made me smile:

Failure was the new rock'n'roll. Which explains why there have been an awful lot of golf memoirs.

None of this happened in a vacuum. Outside the bookshop, popular culture was enfranchising nobodies to share the contents of their navel through talk radio, reality television and — the most emetic, self-promoting medium of all — blogs.1 The logical outcome, a decade or so in, was to detach celebrity from ability sufficiently for an absolute zero called Chantelle — or to give her her scientific name, Dolly the Celeb — to sprout from the test tube, win "Celebrity Big Brother", and immediately gush forth the ne plus ultra of pointless autobiographies, entitled, "Living The Dream".

Jasper Rees, writing in Intelligent Life magazine


Generally speaking... dept.

Another item from my recent Keyhaven adventure:

Keyhaven, February 2008

Well! Only one reader has felt up to tackling that "Bakhtinian" sentence in yesterday's last footnote. Thanks, Ian.

Light lunches... dept.

I was sufficiently intrigued (and alarmed) at the behaviour a while back of the plastic bag containing today's lunchtime buttered smoked kipper fillets (once the microwaves started kicking in) that I actually photographed the oven, in sufficient haste (as you can unclearly see) as to miss out the focussing stage...

Kippers

... in case I needed to document a subsequent explosion. And, yes, I had pierced the bag in several places. I must say, I thought "fillet" means "we've taken all the bones out before you chomp them". Must be some new meaning of the verb.

Still, while on the lunch topic, my friend Lesley satirically said (when kindly suggesting a future lunch date recently — if that makes temporal sense) that I should be the one to pick the date as "your social life is the busiest". Cue hollow laughter. But, consider: I'm off on a mini-adventure tomorrow with my kindly co-pilot to remove him for a short while from any temptation of fiddling with his wife's new and newly-delivered PC. On Thursday, it's the MQ monthly gathering, this time at the Empress of Blandings in Copythorne.2 On Friday, it's time to swap notes with some old former colleagues at the Dolphin. And this evening, I'm invited to a showing (my choice) of a documentary DVD about the (self-styled?) "Pope of Trash" preceded by a roast chicken din-dins.

Perhaps she does have a point? Anyway, it all makes for wonderful compensation for the lousy weather as I continue to grapple with this ghastly new state of widowerhood. I don't recall Christa and I ever going out more than two days in a row except when on holiday, or (of course) during the early part of last year when we were seriously enjoying my status as a retiree.

  

Footnotes

1  What you're reading here, I hasten to add, is a diary dear reader, not a blog!
2  I am on taxi duty for three of the regulars, including its organiser.