2008 — 13 July: Sunday
To my surprise (and delight) the cassette I recorded in dummy head stereo on that borrowed Nakamichi back in the long, hot summer of 1976 has Christa on it as well as her parents. (I finally plucked up the courage to play it after all these years.) In fact I've just been listening to all three wonderfully familiar voices chattering happily away in their native language, and my cheeks ache from smiling. So there's a little project for me: turn this into an MP3 and hang it off the server as a personal podcast.
Have to finish rebuilding the A/V stack first, of course — I've been testing it step by step as there is no point leaving it until everything is back in place and then finding out that socket you can no longer reach has the wrong lead in it. I've also just removed the oldest piece of kit still in the system; the Technics FM tuner that I bought when I moved into this house. It's actually been in this house longer than Christa and Peter, which is rather an odd thought.
Tonight's picture of Christa is from even earlier than that recording: the summer of 1974. It shows her arriving at the little farmhouse flat I was sharing at the time with an ICL computer salesman (who had a lot more money than I did and drove a Porsche). Still, it was kind of him to sublet a room to me. (I had been expelled from the vicarage by this time as the vicar wasn't having any truck with an unmarried chap and an unmarried chapess under the same roof when they had obviously become such close friends — what would the churchwarden say?) By the look of it, Christa's just picked up one of her German newspapers — they tended (back then) to be more full of dense text than the UK Sunday papers.
Christa arriving at the Old Windsor farmhouse flat, 1974
Such a nice smile! I'm off for a walk in the vicinity of Sandy Balls in a few hours, and will need to stuff the crockpot and make a packed lunch before then. And grab some breakfast to sustain me, of course. So g'night at 00:46 or so.
A good story
It's 09:00 and, having just finished stuffing the next crockpot (the same crockpot, but with its next meal — swapping the pre-made red wine and shallots gravy for a return to the chopped tomatoes in garlic and olive oil for a change and not forgetting the parsnip this time) I've just finished listening to a lovely Charles Wheeler story you can revisit here. Time to contemplate breakfast and the construction of a packed lunch. Sun is shining. Son, by the way, sent a brief email from France on Friday: "Just so you know; having a very nice, relaxing time. We're watching a thunderstorm off in the distance — very distinct lightning forks."
Here, by the way, is the current state of the left-hand half of my A/V stack just 10 minutes ago. What a mess, heh? I wonder where the remote control for the re-instated Sony digital TV box is, too, though I'm only using it as a radio, and it's already set to my preferred listening.
Next task: pack that lunch. And get dressed too, I guess. It's all go before a chap can go.
In the bad old days...
... you saved up or somehow scraped together a deposit, handed it over to a building society from which you got a mortgage to cover the rest, moved into your little house, decorated it, maintained it, filled it with clutter and/or kids, traded up into a slightly bigger one, and generally stayed in thrall to the system all your working life, hoping to have cleared your loan by the time you came to retire on your final salary pension scheme. If, for whatever reason along the way (and there were many blameless reasons, of course) you couldn't pay your mortgage, you lost your house. What you might call the "snakes and ladders" game.
Now they're considering a scheme whereby local authorities use "central guvmint funds" (that is, my taxes) to buy your house (at what valuation, one wonders?) and then rent it back to you (at what rent, one wonders?). Given that the story (here) is headed "Emergency scheme to help cash-strapped homeowners" (not that you're a homeowner until you've actually paid for the damned thing, in my opinion) I'm left almost regretting the fact that — like a mug — I simply bit the bullet and paid my "dues" all the way along the line for 25 years.
Christa could never understand why the UK was so keen on home ownership compared with much of the continent, but agreed with me that the best thing to do while trapped in the system was to go with the flow and at least clear the debt while still employed, and I'm very glad we did so. I could never understand why so much of Attila the Hen's supposed economic transformation of the UK seemed to be based on this smoke and mirrors approach. And, of course, various species of cockroaches1 were always underfoot to advise us on ever larger, cheaper mortgage schemes, too. Aah, the collective insanity of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those were the days, indeed. "What goes up must come down."
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig
Back, an hour or so ago (it's now well into Freak Zone time) from an enjoyable little six mile ramble round a deserted part of the New Forest followed by a session trying to ensure a PC was unaffected by any malware infestation(s) as a possible explanation for its odd behaviour. (Of course, since it was running Windows, one can never be certain what constitutes odd behaviour, I guess.) Nearly time to peel the lid off the crockpot and see if there's any odd behaviour in there. Then time to finish rebuilding the right-hand side of the A/V stack.
Ten years?!
So "jabs" against MRSA and C. Difficile could be with us within ten years? So all we have to do until then is, what, exactly? Stay out of hospitals, for starters.