2008 — 19 May: Monday
Just gone 02:05 and I'm back, and waiting for the dish-washing water downstairs to cool towards merely scalding — guess which idiot left the immersion heater switched on all evening while he was out enjoying himself? (Last night's DVDs were "Paris Je t'aime" and the Who's live concert performance of "Tommy" from 1989 somewhere in California. Both were absolutely excellent and highly recommended.)
It's now quite chilly outside, with wonderful wind-swept high clouds scudding across a very bright moon. The motorway back from Winchester is pleasingly empty at one in the morning, apart from lorry-loads of BMW Minis being taken down to the port. (Reminds me for some reason of that wonderful line from Beyond the Fringe "Turn your face to the wall, dear, while the gentlemen go by!" — in the context of depositing trousers all over the country.)
Now, it is said that the camera never lies.1 If that's the case, our little family's day out at Chessington in the mid 1980s shows both Christa and Peter to have been happy bunnies. It's all done by mirrors, of course.
I think that will have to do until I've had some more of that sleep stuff. G'night!
R.I.P. Will Elder
Another veteran cartoon artist has left us. I have, and treasure, my two volumes of "Little Annie Fanny". There's a nice NYT obituary here. I was reading it for the second time this morning (I skimmed it briefly seven hours ago) while the Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush track "Don't give up" was playing. I'd forgotten how touching the lyrics are.
Scuse me while I dry my eye so I can read the rest of the snail mail! The one that got to me was Christa's invitation to "beat cancer" with Race for Life 2008. <Sigh> But I've now got that DVD of Lindsay Anderson's "O Lucky Man!" to (as it were) fall back on. Good. A mere £9-99 for the two-disc special edition, too. Magic! Well worth it even just for the Alan Price music on the soundtrack. Check it out. Oh well, the sun is shining (roughly where the moon was, last time I looked) and there's brekkie to be ingested and a stuffed washing machine to go deal with. At least the dishes are all done. Roll on self-cleaning nanotechnology...
Good grief!... dept.
The BBC tells me that people aren't getting married because of the cost (have they not heard of a small-scale register office ceremony?) and elsewhere on their vast web site that "Over a billion people worldwide live in regions where 20%-50% of marriages are consanguineous — that is where the partners are descended from the same ancestor." Aren't we all, according to some "Holy" books?! (I'm reminded of that nasty little 1957 SF story "Let's be Frank" by Brian Aldiss. A mutation leads to a shared consciousness that eventually unifies the entire human population, not in a good way.) And an ignorant young man on BBC Radio Solent has just assured his listeners that "glass does not prevent damage to UVA rays". I'm sure he thinks he knows what he means...
There's a yellowing item I typeset for Christa many years ago. I still keep it stuck to a kitchen cabinet. Of course, in her regrettable absence, my rendering of it into English may be a little flawed (like me, I guess):
I keep a couple of apposite quotations here, too. She liked them both. Particularly the one by Bozman, which always made her giggle, as she could clearly "hear" the Germanic shadow behind it. ("The from the German into the English language translation by no means a so easy a task as it appears to be is.") I've just had to tell the membership secretary of the Institute of Linguists of her death being the reason for her lapse of membership renewal...
Peter and I could (and, I fear, would) both gently tease Christa from time to time about what sometimes seemed to us her unhealthy interest in UK supermarkets. She would be having the last laugh as I now listen on BBC Radio 4 to tales of the success of Aldi and Lidl in the UK High Street — she was delighted when these stores opened here as she knew them both from Germany, of course, many years ago.
Music hath charms... dept.
Just a couple of days before we got Christa's diagnosis I noted here that I'd just ripped one of the nicest CDs in my collection. Today, as I start on what I hope and believe is the final carton of CDs from the loft, I'm discovering that my unconscious strategy must have been to rip all my favourite albums first. (Quite probably to cheer myself up as we contended with symptoms without knowing then the underlying cause.) This music...
... was originally in Christa's vinyl LP collection when she came over to the UK in 1973. It merged seamlessly into my own collection. I knew the title track as I'd heard John Peel play it. (I even have the name of BBC news reader Brian Empringham in my memory, so I suspect Mr Peel and he may have exchanged a few words about it at the time.) Anyway, I bought this CD for her as soon as it was available.
Update: I liked the original sleeve (and rather regret the passing of 12" vinyl) but I also liked the treatment they gave to the new artwork here. To satisfy myself that I could, I chased down the font (it's available from the fabulous EFF folk2) and whacked it into Xara for a tiny bit of drop shadow play and colouring:
Update: Lunch is (at 13:58) lunched. I'm vaguely contemplating opening up one of the PCs to assess the feasibility of fitting a new, faster, bigger, hard drive and giving it a brain transplant. It's a hobby — a chap needs a hobby. (The hobby of listening to religious chaps try to make the case that medical research is a moral issue quickly palls; particularly when they have heard the viewpoint of an articulate doctor with a dying son, and choose not to answer simple, direct questions. Music often wins over talk pieces on the radio, trust me.)
Written word... dept.
Music, words, talking... nice mini-interview piece:
I remind him of the violinist Nigel Kennedy's recent comments about the arrogance and futility of conductors.
"I don't see why we should take seriously a fellow who has made such an idiot of himself," [Sir Colin] Davis responds in his quiet, unruffled way.
"He can play the fiddle very, very well, but he went off on that spree, making himself a celebrity. Silly boy. I'd like to see him play
the Elgar concerto without a conductor!"
Here's a nice review of one of my recent acquisitions. And an interesting piece here, too: "Universities, those most cowardly of modern institutions, are never more beguiling than when caught out not having the courage of their lack of conviction." There's a lovely equine joke right at the end, by the way.
And some food for thought.
There and back... dept.
A minor-league adventure down to Hedge End to see, among other things, if there was any sign of any tangible Freesat kit. Not a smidgen. How about USB memory sticks fast enough to boost Vista? Nope. Case Logic holder for the next 264 DVDs? Nope. 320GB SATA drive and cable? That, we can manage. Quite a lot of traffic by the time we returned — I took along my main co-pilot to ride shotgun and get the pair of us out of our houses. And now, I wonder, is this funny?
Tom's worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Amidst the throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit frizzier than is usual in China, survived.) The man's widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill's gates. As compensation for her husband's death, she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband's gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.
Not quite in the same literary league as Richard Preston's "American Steel" perhaps...
Inattention to detail... dept.
Ripping my way through these last few CDs, I occasionally browse the lyrics. Ry Cooder's "Show Time", for example, and Blind Alfred Reed's 1929 song How can a poor man stand such times and live. I can overlook the missing "?" but I find it hard to accept Linda Hennrick's transcription of "grocery bill" as "grossly bill". Even if the CD was pressed in Japan.
I find it equally hard to accept that Christa's no longer here to say things to. Just simple things. Like "Good God! Do you realise this album "Trilogy" by ELP is over 35 years old? We must be getting old, love!" Or, do you realise "Talking Heads" is an anagram of "King's lead hat" — a track on Brian Eno's 1977 album Before and after science? Or that Eno was interviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle in June 1996 about (among other things) how he composed the Microsoft Windows 95 startup sound. He's got some lovely opinions: "... a computer is basically a nerd-designed, screwdriver addict's machine. It's a machine that's perfect for making small adjustments and not very good for making bold strokes..."
Sharing such things with Christa was just such a large part of our daily life together, of course. And it's easily what I miss most of all.