2008 — 11 May: Sunday
It's now six months since you left us, Christa... Six months? Unheimlich!1 Peter and I are struggling along as best we can, my love, but it's fair to say we really wish you were still here, happy and (most of all) healthy.
I've given all sorts of things all sorts of thought in the last six months (as you can imagine). I still conclude that Alfred Lord Tennyson was spot on with his "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all". My life without Christa now may be a somewhat melancholy one (though I'm making progress). But my life without Christa in the past 33 years is simply unimaginable. I miss her!
If you click your way around the "postcard" above, you'll discover where I found the lovely line about "marriage", just yesterday. Nice timing. (The other pictures also link to appropriate bits of the diary.)
I found my way to the "marriage" saying from some amazing pictures of a vertigo-inducing bridge here. Is "gephyrophobiacs" a real word? Apparently so, yes. It's an anxiety disorder triggered by a fear of bridges. (I remember feeling uneasy once when I was halfway up one of the oil storage tanks at Hamble refinery when Christa took me along on one of her Chamber of Commerce visits in the late 1990s — she exhibited not a trace of unease herself, of course.)
Morning sunshine
Apparently it's the feast of Pentecost2 — at least, that's what BBC radio 4's "Sunday Worship" is about or for this morning. Off I go channel hopping, hoping for something (anything) more congenial... It's a bit odd, I suppose, to like the polyphonic religious music of, say, Lassus, as much as I do and yet find the sermonising in broadcast services so literally unbearable. Breakfast is going in, as it were, and there's that packed lunch to ponder before I set off.
And a fascinating essay here about Churchill, with a previously unpublished snippet from a 1936 diary entry by Basil Bartlett: "He is a curious character. A sort of Mary Queen of Scots of modern politics. He is bound to emerge historically as a romantic and glamorous figure, but he is surrounded by corpses. No one who has ever served him or been in any way connected to his career, has ever survived to tell the story."
Indeed. Time to get packing. Must remember to dodge today's watercress festival in Alresford. Can't stand the healthy stuff.
Let-down by dominatrix... dept.
My chum Michael, who's doing so much to keep me both fit and sane, has an even unhealthier dependency (at times) on his "Mrs Garmin" than I do on mine. Today, he decided to trust her even after she'd lost the ('scuse the pun) plot at some (compass) point. Turning off the road he knows, we therefore allowed the dominatrix to direct us through a series of ever-narrower dirt tracks skirting, but (like Zeno) never quite attaining, the "A"-road we wanted. I may have sparked the initial problem by suggesting we do what we could to avoid Alresford, but we certainly managed to reach bits new to both of us.
While I wait for a second PC to finish booting, so I can load today's pictures on it, and transfer them across my network very much faster than loading them on my current PC, let me also ponder aloud why rebooting this XP SP3 machine for about the fifth time since "upgrading" it should suddenly revert to the default desktop appearance instead of my preferred "silver" colour scheme. The motherboard's battery, perhaps? Though the machine is only just over two years old.
We started, literally, from here:
And, somewhat after the half-way point, we detoured part of the way down the Shoulder of Lamb Mutton because there was a bench seat ready for our lunch, and some stunning views. Click the pic:
Earwig go again
The bod has been showered; the hot meal is cooling towards edibility; the clock is at the 18:21 mark; I've just decided to switch off the plasma fire's pilot light for the duration of the "summer" (never was one to be too hasty with such decisions, though possibly because the original gas fire had such a dreadful pilot light "system" that we decided it was best left to its own devices). The car is cooking gently out on the drive, and I shall be setting off soon, in my "JIT" fashion, for a rendezvous prior to the Jo Brand performance this evening. Heck, I'm that efficient I even fitted in a small-scale raid on the foody shop this afternoon, too.