2008 — 18 October: Saturday
This time it's 01:14 and I'm safely back from an evening meal at the The Chesil Rectory with Mike, Bryan, and Andrew. Followed by some very fancy Viennese coffee, followed by the remainder of "Fly Boys", which is an amazing story.
Tonight's picture of Christa shows her, shortly before Peter was born, and the expensive electric typewriter I'd bought her with which she earned a surprising amount of freelance income both from her own efforts and by typing some of the material I wrote. A much better investment than the gambling that is stocks and shares:
Christa and her SCM typewriter
I shall close tonight with another colourful picture from the walk earlier:
Another glorious day?
The sunshine certainly makes it look that way. If it carries on I suspect the lure of the sea will shortly overtake me. And if I have to listen to another minute of political blather about who's to blame rather than how to fix the (world's financial) problems I may just re-use a verb I employed last year to an inept bank manageress (at a bank, by the way, that has just happily taken £20,000,000,000 of my money).
Ambiguity piled on ambiguity... dept.
Mr Postie has just pushed my State Pension Forecast through the letterbox.
Please bear in mind any payable additional State Pension we have told you about in this section should replace any additional State Pension amount we told you about earlier in this letter.
It occurs to me I have until April 2016 both to survive, and to parse that sentence. It's also become pleasingly clear that, in fact, I do inherit at least a tiny bit of the State Pension Christa was receiving. So I didn't lie to her on her death bed after all. I am pleased about that out of all proportion, somehow.
Food for thought... dept.
Here's a thoughtful piece on blogging, by Andrew Sullivan. Just in time for the one o'clock news. And also an interesting piece ("In one end and out the burner") about biogas digesters. (Mike and I strolled hastily past a sewage farm at one point on yesterday's trail, concluding we would prefer not to lunch in its immediate vicinity.)
The inner man is pacified. Clouds are piling up in what were clear blue skies. I'm delighted to note that there are fresh patches of colour out in what will always be — to me — Christa's garden. I don't know what these little chaps are, but they are very handsome:
Freshly emerged in late autumn
But even I — whose horticultural ignorance is a legend — know perfectly well what this is! Smells great, too (unlike that sewage farm):
On the same bush, by the way, as the first one here (back in May 2007). It's 16:54 and, if there's a theme to today I guess it's "the reds have it". Just finished a spot of low energy shopping in the Channel Islands; can you believe four re-issued albums by the "MJQ" for less than a fiver? Wow! I would have paid that just for the one track: Variation #1 on 'God rest ye merry, gentlemen' though I do wonder about the position of that comma.