2008 — 3 Mar: Monday, and grim weather?
It's 00:30 or so, and I got back from an enjoyable evening spent in Winchester about 30 minutes ago. Though the Family Guy "Star Wars" parody fell, as it were, on unappreciative eyes and ears, not so the DVD "Once" which we all agreed is a lovely little movie. Not only did it put me in mind of "The Commitments" but the 'hero' was also in that excellent 1991 movie, too.
I made the time yesterday to listen to Stephen Fry's first "podgram" by the way. If you've read the Oliver Sacks piece "A leg to stand on" you'll get some of the flavour of Stephen's plight, with his badly shattered right arm. But I'm drooping fast here, so that's it until after the next batch of sleep. G'night.
Oops
I was tired enough, last night, to leave a superfluous <div> tag lying around, but it doesn't seem to have caused too much trouble. Time is approaching 10:00, first cuppa is approaching the lips, and the sun is blazing away up there in the sky. Where's all that nasty sleet? I'd been going to quote the story about there being 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. which is, it seems, more than the number of Burger whatsits, McThingummies, and the poultry from Kentucker. However, having just finished preparing the ingredients for a strange brew in my crock pot that I shall call "slow-cooked pork loin casserole" (if it works) and "failed experiment" (if it doesn't) I'm off my oats at the moment.
Still need some brekkie, of course, but a second cuppa will do for now. Christa could never get me to state my food preference for "Meal+1" while "Meal" was, as it were, digesting. Turns out this applies to food prep as well as ingestion. I've also discovered that when I've cooked something, I don't always time it correctly for said ingestion. (I'm still learning, Christa!)
For Georg
My brother-in-law takes an occasional peek at this diary. He told me in an email today that he's always delighted to see new photos of his sister "Christel". This is one from last July when she was doing some hazelnut clipping (and totally ignoring the effects of her first cycle of chemotherapy). That's our girl, Georg!
It's only money factoids
Back in 1973, when Christa came over to the UK to work at Royal Holloway College, she opened a current account at what was then the Midland which was the only bank with a branch in Old Windsor. She kept every bit of paperwork ever since then! She also not only stayed loyal to that bank, but even got me to join them when, in 1976, we bought our first house there and it needed a new boiler. That was a £300 loan repaid at a staggering £15 per month! Anyway, I remember the Midland getting into serious trouble1 in 1981 with their foray into ownership of the Crocker bank in San Francisco. Crocker lost a lot of money in the housing market. (Sounding familiar yet?) Today, of course, the Midland has long been submerged within HSBC. And HSBC has more exposure to the housing market in North America than any of the other U.K. chaps. And they've just written off a frankly staggering amount2 of money.
The BBC offers a helpful graphic to "understand" the problems over on the other side of the Atlantic:
How very complex all this has become. Still, at least there are more people in the process among whom the blame can therefore be spread more thinly.
The cost of platinum (used in wedding rings and catalytic converters) has gone up by 30% in the last three weeks or so, according to a Hatton Garden jeweler. The suggested alternative element for rings, at least, is palladium. But £2,000 for a pair of rings?3 That puts our £9 each pair4 from Ealing back in 1975 into the shade, methinks. (I several times was able to find Christa's ring when she dropped it in the garden [both here and in Meisenheim] but when [many years ago] it eventually went permanently AWOL I gave up wearing mine in sympathy, as it were.)
The official poverty line in the UK for a household is now, it seems, £16,492. Are you listening over there in the IBM pension fund vaults?!
Colder snap
Just (14:00 or so) recently back from my little adventure out in search of a meal I didn't cook myself, followed by a gentle pootle around with Mrs Sat Nav showing me roughly where I was rather than mouthing imprecations at me whenever I ignored her. Up through Twyford Moors, and joining the M3 at the Hockley link. Mother Nature kindly provided the car wash, too. Now, once again, the skies are fairly clear, but the temperature has dipped significantly. I think I shall confine myself to barracks for a while.
Back on one of my official Good Days last year, I quoted a snippet from the TLS piece by Adrian Tahourdin, reviewing Pierre Bayard's elegant and witty essay on "How to discuss books that one hasn't read" or, in other words, about reading, or not reading, etc. I've since dipped into this a couple of times, and eventually gave in and ordered a copy. Mr Postie delivered it, with a few other bits and bobs earlier today, and I also found a couple of bargain DVDs while out to lunch. Here's the scoop, as it were:
- How to talk about books you haven't read by Pierre Bayard
- A book of verse by Garry Garrard
The subtitle of this is "the biography of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" ... who could resist that poem's biography? - The cook's companion by Elizabeth Wolf-Cohen
Usefully small, ring-bound, pages. It even contains the "Matzo" balls (Knaidlach) that are the subject of my favourite Marilyn Monroe anecdote! - Wild Hogs — the trailer looked like enormous fun. We shall see
- Rag Tale — the cast list looked like enormous fun. We shall see
- Tipping the velvet — an Andrew Davies adaptation that I haven't seen (though I saw Keeley Hawes in the [awfully unfunny] Death at a funeral just last Friday)
- Goldfish memory — as enjoyed a week ago Saturday
Time is now 18:22 or thereabouts and the cooking that's slowly occurring downstairs is making its presence felt, as it were, up here in the nasal tract. Report to follow. (I shall also be dividing the pile of steaming stuff into two, and turning one of the sub-piles into a home-made frozen ready meal.)
My slow-cooked pork loin casserole was very tasty. The two-thirds I didn't have room for is cooling, and will be heading for the freezer fairly soon. That's going to be a potentially messy operation. Meanwhile, I've been dividing my time and attention between that compilation DVD of the "Mock the Week" show and a lovely piece about the charms of Wikipedia, by Nicholson Baker. Ostensibly, this is a review of "Wikipedia: the missing manual" by John Broughton, but it gives Baker the time and space to exercise his considerable skill in rambling entertainingly.