2008 — 8 November: Saturday
After a thoroughly enjoyable musical tele-visual evening (Christa would have liked the Randy Newman1 session) it's time for tonight's picture of my absent best friend:
Christa and Peter in the Old Windsor hallway, Spring 1981
I've also found, in one of those ad inserts that tends to fall out of the Radio Times, a DVD of The growing pains of P.C. Penrose by the chap (Roy Clarke) who (still) writes the amazingly long-running "Last of the Summer Wine". We both enjoyed the gentle adventures of "Rosie". So I suspect that will be my next order... And BBC Radio 3 is still putting out great stuff at 00:54 too.
G'night.
The rain it raineth...
But the music (on BBC Radio 2) drowns it out nicely. Good ol' Brian Matthew. And PJ Proby is still going strong, too. Amazing! Nor did I realise quite how much the Hendrix variant of "All along the watchtower" had been overdubbed and tinkered with before its eventual release on Electric Ladyland. There will also (shortly) be some incoming video should it still be raining in a few days time... Having gathered P.C. Penrose to my bosom, as it were, I decided to supplement him with the first two series of that amiable layabout "Shelley" (Hywel Bennett). Christa and I liked that programme very much. Now, if only they'd produce a DVD release of Chance in a million with the amazing coupling of Simon Callow and Brenda Blethyn...
Tonight's bittersweet TV treat is undoubtedly going to be the tribute to the late Geoffrey Perkins on BBC 2. Oh well, time for breakfast, to the deliciously non-Jonathan Ross show following the "unreserved apology" that has just been broadcast.
Your Money or your Life... dept.
Among the many things that have never occurred to me is the proposition that "life insurance, [is] one of the most important financial inventions of all time". Snippet and source:
First, probability theory was invented, with the great French mathematician Blaise Pascal attributing the founding insight to a monk at Port-Royal. Then came work from John Graunt and Edmond Halley, who pioneered the estimation of life expectancy and laid the foundation stones for actuarial mathematics. Next came research by Jacob Bernoulli on confidence intervals, which gave us a measurement of certainty; then Abraham de Moivre's normal distribution, Daniel Bernoulli's invention of utility, and Thomas Bayes's discovery of statistical inference.
I know, of course, that Christa gave up her life insurance in 2006 (as she said last year: "What a pity I didn't extend my life insurance last year when the insurance company gave me the option to do so.") We'd kept her policy ticking along since Old Windsor days shortly before Peter was born "just in case", figuring I would be better able to fund a housekeeper if misfortune left me "holding the baby".
Bring me sunshine... dept.
Spotting a gap in the clouds, I nipped out (on foot) for a splash of cow juice and (wonder of wonders) a newspaper. Haven't done that for a very long time. Next big event? I'm predicting lunch, but not quite yet. It's only 11:55 after all.
Now, as my lunch is getting the last of its molecules agitated, I see that the New Zealand Herald (in the wake of that fine country's lurch to the centre-right) is offering its readers a set of five choices in a post-election poll. Well, at least they don't claim their polls are scientific, but merely reflect the opinions of those Internet users who have chosen to participate!
- Exhilarated
- Confident
- Bored
- Drained
- Worried
Right... time for a bite to eat.
inter alia
Leaving to one side the idea that Latin is not to be used in official communications (lest the great Joe Public confuses "e.g." with "egg", e.g.) I note that I skated lightly over what else I acquired yesterday. You perhaps spotted the John O'Farrell book? You won't however have seen the CD I'm listening to, nor the magazine to which it was stuck. I must say, if their freebies are always this good, I may have to change my music magazine allegiance (yet again):
It's almost as good as having a new Leonard Cohen album. And the rain, which is now (15:48) pouring down, matches some of the tracks perfectly. Fabulous.
Well, I don't think I'll be bothering with a newspaper again for another year or so. I've just zapped a mug of cold tea neglected while I looked, in vain, for anything much worth lingering over in today's Guardian. Yet I was a loyal (some might say "avid") reader for over three decades. Yet I would still have no real idea what a "tracker" mortgage is, as the assumption implicit throughout lengthy pieces (one by John Lanchester being basically commonsense) on the UK housing market obsession and various "best buy" financial suggestions, is that it's so obvious it goes without saying. There was, I admit, an interesting article by Sara Maitland on her literal quest for peace and quiet, but I prefer this part of the UK (even though it's dark, wet, rather windy, and the tum is beginning to suggest it's time [18:25] for a refill).