2008 — 15 August: Friday
I'm back, a few minutes ago, from an evening meal and a couple of films with Mike over in moony Winchester. I must say his projection system plays very nicely via the HDFury at 720p. Meanwhile, I see that Big Bro's travel plans are firming up, even if he has just sent everyone a note with the wrong day in it — it's his age, you know. So, just time for a quick picture of Christa, and then I'd better head for beddy-bye:
Christa and her lovely smile, 1976ish
The vaguely tartan brown shirt neatly folded on top of the stack, I remember, was a nice cotton one that Dad brought me back from a trip to America in the mid-1960s. Christa liked it, and (shall we say?) took it over. I don't think we ever did get around to repainting our bedroom in Old Windsor, either. You can just see the edge of one of the Chris Foss airbrush SF pictures I stuck on one of the walls, however. Oh, well. G'night at 02:03 or so.
On second thoughts, let's just have a close-up of that lovely smile, shall we?
It warms the cockles of my grumpy old heart! (What are cockles, anyway?)
Guess who forgot...
... to buy carrots, yesterday? Though quite why I should remember that as soon as I wake up is a bit weird. Still, it's currently (08:20) bright and sunny so I shall rectify my mistake while the going's good. Tea first, though — let's not get carried away.
Browsing the web really ought to carry a (mental) health warning. I hadn't even heard of this particular superbug... But sanity can be restored by reading a viewpoint suggesting Allan Konigsberg (aka Woody Allen) "[is] a director consistently interested in the great books and the Western philosophical tradition — and willing to make them the very stuff of his movies". Can you name the movies implicitly referenced here? Or are there too many candidate titles?
In this age of blood and sex in Hollywood productions, whimsical independent films about dysfunctional families, coming-of-age movies, or cartoons of happy animals saving the polar ice caps, it is difficult to select serious intellectuals from the central casting roster of glib, lowbrow directors.
I doubt, from the URL, that this will remain correctly linked for long — get it while it's fresh. Meanwhile, do you suppose the Guardian does this deliberately?
Better get that breakfast.
Say goodbye, weeds!
For the second time ever, I'm going to go out and play in the front "garden" — Christa's theory being that it was now low-maintenance. Well, try telling that to all the wild flowers of unrecognised virtue that have been springing up. Think of it as a pre-emptive strike against Big Bro's scorn. Carrots etc. all safely gathered in, by the way. Crikey, it's 10:56 already. Now, can I squeeze into her gloves? I've long since forgotten where I stashed the new David-sized pair I bought in an initial flurry of domestic enthusiasm, many months ago. I can hear her giggling, albeit with a tinge of exasperation. (I used to get that a lot over the years. Good job she liked me!)
Feeling vaguely virtuous having devoted an hour of my life to weed extirpation,1 I shall now wait to see if I turn out to be as allergic to some of the botanical exudations as Christa was. When I removed the gloves, I had blood on my hands, and I don't mean from all my weedy victims. I had no idea thorns were such nasty little pricks! I shall also grab a bite to eat (it's already 13:28) then (now that I've just paid a humongous credit card bill and still socked a couple of unused halfpennies into a dusty savings account closely-coupled to my current one) I shall go for a mid-afternoon spin in the newly refilled banger. The Shell place was selling go-juice at what now almost seems to be the low price of £1-09 per litre.
Oh dear!
It's 16:52 and I'm listening to a delightfully jazzed-up Jacques Loussier version of Ravel's "Bolero" from a recent Prom, I've returned — successfully and successful — from town (Big Bro now has four issues of his aviation magazine to catch up with), but I've just groaned at a sentence in Peter Bradshaw's review of Hellboy II:
At his obviously mature age, Hellboy is incidentally entitled to upgrade his name to adult level, but has decided against it, perhaps because of unfortunate associations with mayonnaise.
Vanity Fair... dept.
I knew perfectly well that Thackeray's Vanity Fair was Christa's favourite book by a considerable margin (though I confess I have not read it). She'd studied it in depth as part of one of her degree courses, which (miraculously) did not put her off it for life. And somewhere on her shelves is a well-thumbed Penguin paperback with copious pencilled notes and underlinings.2 Anyway, I did buy her two video variants, the Susan Hampshire 1967 TV series, and the 2005 Reese Witherspoon film version:
Tonight, I listened keenly while Kathy Lette raved on for 30 minutes about how the book had changed her life. And I'm forced to the reluctant conclusion that I've been missing out on a Good Thing (just as Christa told me I was, of course). But then, although we both enjoyed the Simon Raven BBC TV adaptation of The Pallisers3 I never succeeded in getting her to tackle the six original Trollope novels that I'd only recently finished reading when we first met, so we were sort of even I guess. (And I wonder if I'd still have the patience and stamina to do so now, 34 years on.)