2008 — 28 September: Sunday
My parents were married for 34 years and a few months when Dad died. Today would have been Christa's and my 34th anniversary. Ho hum.
Tonight's picture shows (I hope) the improvement I was able to make by using Mike's Nikon slide scanner, compared to my Epson flatbed. Back at the end of May I used a shot from June 1974 taken in the early morning light in the Beaumont Old Windsor ICL car park. Here's the "new, improved" version:
Christa in the early morning light, Beaumont, June 1974
Last night's DVD viewing, by the way, was indeed the final episode of "Lost in Austen" followed by the usual "making of" featurette. Very enjoyable. Tell me: in what sense can a bank's loans1 be "worth" £50,000,000,000 if they don't know which, if any, will be paid back? Good old UK taxpayer to the rescue (again). Where the hell do people think "guvmint money" comes from, pray tell? Oh well, g'night.
That was the Anniversary that was!
I spent the day with Mike basically walking a loop to the north of the tiny hamlet of Shalden which you reach by approaching Jane Austen territory (Chawton) on the A31 and then heading north on the A339 towards Lasham. Had a disobliging farmer-type person not ploughed up the entirety of one of the public footpaths it would have been just a tad over seven miles. We saw plenty of gliders, and it was both sunny and pleasant.
It's now 17:15 and I'm safely home, having dodged the M3 at the last minute when I spotted the warning "40" sign just as I was about to join it at the Hockley interchange. I think a nice, hot soak is now in my near-term future. I must say, Christa, this is by several parsecs the oddest wedding anniversary of my life so far — without you here to celebrate it with me is quite bad enough, without you being dead, dammit!
Your friend Ute sent me over a little story about motivation that would have made you laugh... little Zach was doing very badly at maths in school despite all attempts to tutor him, so his parents sent him off to the local Catholic school. After just one day he started hitting the books, hard, and his report card at the end of term showed an incredible improvement. Curious, his mother asked him what had made the difference. Was it the nuns, the structure, the uniform, the discipline, the books? No, apparently none of these things. So what made the difference? Said the young chap:
Well, on the first day of school, when I saw that guy nailed to the plus sign, I knew they weren't fooling around.
Minimal wages... dept.
The UK minimum wage2 level is again on the way up. It's gone up "by 59% since legislation was introduced in 1998, compared to a 44% rise in average pay over the same period." (Would that my IBM pensioner's pittance was as upwardly mobile!) The maximum penalty for employers not paying this is now an unlimited fine. That should sort out the credit crunch, and no mistake...
I don't have savings of greater than £35,000 in a variety of UK institutions but, if I did, I would find this list of which institutions share their banking licences utterly fascinating. And as the mergers continue, it's necessary to see whether the merged entities retain separate licences.
Bandoneon, again... dept.
It's been BBC Radio 3 all evening, basically, since the curious Drama on 3. I was pleased to recognise the bandoneon at one point during the "Words and Music" that's just ended. Not to mention the catalogue of nasal put-downs from the Anthony Burgess translation of Cyrano de Bergerac!