2008 — 11 December: Thursday
Oh dear. My Interweb thingy connection dropped about eighty minutes ago, for whatever reason (start of World War III, perhaps?) so I'm flying blind as it were. Still, nothing to stop me preparing the start, at least, of the next diary entry. Hah! It's back.
Christa in Old Windsor, late 1970s
Words (literally) fail me... dept.
Recall my first evening with Christa (way back in April 1974) was spent enjoyably arguing,1 quite forcefully, over an article in the vicar's Daily Torygraph rag. This astonishing story would have provoked another heated exchange, I suspect, though we'd both have been on the same side this time around! I do wonder what Colin the vicar would have made of it, too. (I used to have some fabulous "discussions" with him.)
G'night, at 01:37 or so. Next big adventure? Lunch at the IBM Clubhouse — better eat first! And sleep.
Reviewing the reviews of the reviewers... dept.
Private Eye regularly removes the urine out of the various book reviews and the strangely symmetric opinions authors seem to have of one another's work. The London Review of Books has a go, too:
In this suspicious context, one person shines out for his truth-telling. 'The book I've enjoyed most this year,' Alastair Darling writes, 'is Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. It's a thoroughly evocative novel from one of the best writers of his generation. Reading it was a great escape from the Treasury.' This is wrong on so many levels that it could only be artless. Or so I thought, until I realised that it's actually fiendishly clever: in times like these, who'd want a chancellor who took risks on their reading matter, or didn't like Ian McEwan? What a safe pair of hands. Alastair Darling: winner of the prize for book of the year of the year.
Time (10:02) for breakfast on this lovely sunny, frosty morning. It seems I'm not yet quite out of the clutches of the Guardian's marketing folk — the morning email brings me a fiendishly well-judged offer. But food for the bod first. Off I go.
Crikey. The Waitrose car park, crowded and on ice — quite unlovely. Still, safely back, next batch of crockpot stuffing ready for the magic touch (I'll do it overnight, methinks) and I even remembered to pick up a Radio Times (and shake out all the loose ads first, of course). Next stop: Hursley clubhouse car park. Now, where the heck did I put my membership card? And do I remember the way?!
Later that day...
The upward lurch of the revised monthly payment for gas and electricity fails to amuse. My lunchtime ex-colleagues tell me the pension fund is (once again) also failing to amuse, having taken a turn, as it were, for the worse. But they gave me a wonderful tip about lining the grill with a sacrificial layer of baking foil when doing my (grilled, rather than fried) "cooked brekkies" in future to save on the ghastly washing-up task — now why didn't I think of that before? My oppo wasn't around for a (s)pot of afternoon tea, so I took myself off to Southampton in a huff, on the grounds that tomorrow's weather looks like it will be distinctly nastier than today's.
Having twice mentioned reviews (here, and [earlier] here) of the new book by Oliver Sacks ("Musicophilia"), a not totally unrelated email exchange today prompted me to p-p-p-pick up a Picador of it. That, the new Linux Format magazine, and the January 2009 issue of The Word (with its CD, of course) should keep me quiet for a bit. Ideally, allowing time out for the stuffing of the inner man, until the final part of "Little Dorrit" later tonight. (I'm about 200 pages into the "real" thing, and have deliberately not yet started on the two-film variant.)
It's 18:22, it's cold, and I'm hungry. Time to get cooking.
Good heavens. Harry Shearer listens to BBC 6Music a lot on the Interweb thingy. Excellent. Well, that's the (literal) collapse of the House of Clennam, in glorious BBC HD, with inglorious lip-sync problems throughout the entire hour. Now I'd better get busy with the crockpot goodies tonight to avoid starvation tomorrow. There is just no end to the endless round of domestic stuff, is there? (Heck, I even cut my hair today. No, I still haven't found the electric clippers, which [on balance] is probably a Good Thing.)
I wonder if...
... Christa would recognise her son? He's just rung to warn me2 of his impending arrival tomorrow evening, and to state his dietary requirements,3 which include fish and salad. But then, what would she make of her husband's crockpottery experiments, I wonder? Said utensil is loaded and starting to simmer nicely. It's 23:28 and Bob Dylan's Theme Time radio hour is in full swing, too. And tomorrow evening promises 90 minutes of Roy Orbison on BBC4.