2008 — 14 August: Thursday
I've been enjoying Mad Men. Perhaps "enjoying" is putting it a bit strongly, but it's certainly a slick and skilful production even if the characters and depicted behaviour are all pretty dreadful.
So, to tonight's picture — a simple, non-clickable, portrait for a change:
Don't ask me to put a precise date on this, beyond the late 1970s. Christa always (always) had a smile for me, right to the end of her life. In fact, I'm pretty sure she liked me! It was a standing joke between us that I'd ask her, at least once a day "Do you still like me a bit?"1 (They do say the old jokes are the best.)
G'night at 00:04 or so.
Today's new word
I'm on a tight-ish schedule this morning, having decided late last night to try a little shower-dodging walk. So (at 08:50) I have breakfast to finish, and a quick lunch to prepare and pack before setting off. But there's always time for a new word. This one's apparently from Dickens:
Of course, he did write straightforward, well-made plays, but many more were predicated on an awareness of the oddity of things when viewed from another angle. His idol
Dickens had a word for it, "mooreeffoc", which is simply "coffee room" backwards, the word seen from the other side of a glazed door.
I believe I introduced Simon to this coinage.
Erm, shouldn't that be two words — "moor eeffoc"? Heavens, I've also just learned there's another creature called a "blue bottle". (Source.) Or should that be "el ttobeulb"?
What a shower
We dodged all showers while on foot, but I literally ran into a couple of them while narrowly avoiding a large queue on the motorway on the drive home. Nice little 5.5 mile tramp around an army firing range, followed by the packed lunch back here at the ranch to the news that 97.2% of "A"-level pupils have been successful. I suppose it only finally becomes meaningless when more than 100% succeed.2 Well, there are now rumbles of thunder, too. But I need to nip out for some supplies sooner or later; I shall have a hungry Big Bro to feed for a week, it seems.
It's 15:58 and the next batch of edible items is safely housed. It's sunny again, and the porch thermometer is showing 30C in direct sunlight.
Today's new meaning of an old word
Scratching around, I find I never knew the origin of "nostalgia", which is something that fits we grumpy old men like a comfy glove:
I no longer count myself among the despisers of nostalgia. Often it is disparaged as facile sentiment, as ornate self-pity, as memory's kitsch; and it began its career as the name for a disease — specifically, for the homesickness that soldiers experience abroad. The pathological yearning for return was soon extended from soldiers to sailors (its nautical version was called calenture), and then to exiles, and then, most achingly, to the end of childhood.
Oddly (perhaps) I did know "calenture". It occurs in Robinson Crusoe, and is also an album by The Triffids, though the music obviously didn't impress me enough to be kept in my collection. They defined the word as "Tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them" which is subtly divergent from Wieseltier's yearning for return. OK, I've hauled out the photo-reduced compact edition of the Complete Oxford Dictionary, grabbed a magnifying glass, and gone looking. The Triffids win. One can easily get lost inside a large dictionary, stumbling across snippets such as "Pure chastity excels in Gust, the Calentures of baneful Lust"... I would ask Christa what the devil that means, but she doesn't seem to be around. <Sigh>
I bought the only book I have by Raymond Tallis (Hippocratic Oaths: medicine & its discontents) in December 2005. But I see he has a new one out, with a lovely phrase about blushing3 in it: "Blushing is a kind of glass-bottomed boat enabling us to look at the depths upon which our ordinary moments float." (Source.) Maybe so. The only time I travelled in a glass-bottomed boat, which was off the coast of Florida in 1992 on an IBM-subsidised holiday, I jolly nearly lost my lunch. It did occur to me that that would do the coral reef no good at all! And I'm sure I would have blushed, too.