2008 — 3 May: Saturday walkies?
"When we were very young" Christa and I had a fine disregard for rules and regulations that sought to curtail our ability to give Junior a good time. I expect the statute of limitations safely applies to this illegal bit of gravity-assisted fun:
Time (00:01) for some sleep.
Today's plan
Is a walk from Kings Somborne up towards Stockbridge, then looping back to KS south along the Test Way, trying hard to avoid the muddiest trails. I gather rain is due by about 16:00 so (at 08:44) it's time to start the sandwich prep. And the normal refuelling, of course. I mentioned the fact that my PCs are helping to keep me sane. I'm not sure I'd like to go this extra mile. There's an article in Wired, too. Some days, I just don't fancy a freezing swim.
I see Sebastian Faulks has revealed 13 books that didn't make his Top 40 for a Waterstone's promotion.1 Oh dear, I've only read two of the 13, though one is the extraordinary Julian Jaynes. And I can surely trade off "The Rack" against "The Plague and I"? (The latter is a memoir, not a novel.) But his main list includes my favourite Dickens, and the only novel I'm aware of with a character in it who has my surname. It also includes my friend Brian's favourite book, the frankly terrible "Magus".
By the way, who is Sebastian Faulks?! Time to don the walking gear. Wonder if it's worth packing the camera?
Water's the world coming to?
No, not the new mayor of London. Merely the fact that my water meter installation is set for next Thursday (not that I even have to be in). What a drip! Both Boris and I will be instituting "new financial controls," it seems. Still, I don't need any congestion charging in the house. I positively rattle around in it, alas.
It's now 16:30, and the rain held off until we got back to the car. A nice, sunny walk of about 7.5 miles with very few people around, but some of them remarkably surly and unwilling to exchange simple verbal courtesies. And some awful news of random attacks on the radio, come to that. What's wrong with people in the UK? We're all in this life together. I just don't understand what is going through their minds. If anything.
Ever noticed...
... by the way, how the rich live in houses rather different from mine? This one's a beaut (and I had some fun with both Photoshop and Fireworks to dissipate the converging verticals of my hastily-snapped shot):
Maybe it's why some people are surly, come to think of it.
Now who could this be?
Found while multi-taskily ripping, scanning, and listening to the classic serial:
Sipping coffee in the House of Lords, [xxxx] bristles at the charge that his book is nothing more than an upmarket green ink letter from an ill-informed retiree. He may be famous now as [yyyy's] dad and for his diet tips (cut out dairy and alcohol and eat less — he lost five stone as a result) but he is still a sharp debater... At times, though, the mask of rationalism slips... He is very drawn to what he says is the underrated upside of climate change. In his book, he says the hot summer of 2003, which killed 15,000 elderly people in France, was "perfectly tolerable" at his own house in Armagnac.
I'm now (22:30ish) enjoying a series of Graeme Garden pieces on BBC7 digital radio. I was recently a tiny bit scathing about DAB radio here in the Benighted Kingdom. But I can't help feeling this little admission on the BBC's own pages vindicates my opinion:
When digital radio kicked off, the promise was better sound quality than FM (partly ensured by high bit rates, of course). These have evidently been nibbled away. An 80kbps stream strikes me as a bit ludicrous, so I'm sticking to Freeview (or Freesat in due course).