2008 — 13 December: Saturday
A little later than "normal" because I've been chatting with my son, here's tonight's photo of Christa. See if you can guess where and when before clicking!
Christa at St Michael's Mount, September 1975
Still raining, dammit, and sounding rather windy too. G'night, at 00:33 or so. Well, actually it's 01:30 but who's counting?
Rain again
I let the pair of us sleep in, so it's now 11:13 and a pair of breakfasts beckon. My newly-svelte 12-stone son is having his first banana on his first Oatibix. Progress of a sort. Let's see what he manages to do to the tuna.
Don't you hate it when...
... "Hollywood" unnecessarily remakes that old classic starring our alien pal Klaatu1 (and his giant robot Gort)?
Keanu Reeves stars, giving the kind of torpid performance that lesser beings can only approximate by necking a hundredweight of Temazepam. The lights are on at the top of the spaceship, but there's no one at the controls... [Reeves] is perhaps the only plausible casting, given that David Bowie is now too advanced in years to fall to earth again without breaking something.
Is this damning with faint praise, or merely unkindness, I wonder?
Next adventure?
Up into the largely-unexplored land that is the loft. I think, in search of his ski clothes. I knew I should have finished rewiring all the lights up there. And then (now that he's claimed ownership of part of the Samsonite airline luggage Christa and I originally bought for our aborted trip to Seattle2 in September 2004 to see Shary Flenniken) maybe a spot of that fishy lunch. It's 13:15 and he says he's peckish.
As I remarked, after a visitor has left the house it becomes disproportionately empty. When that visitor has a genome that contains (in whatever sense) 50% of Christa, the sensation is horribly intensified...
Oh well, while he's driving back to his flat I can console myself with the washing-up, the tidying-up, and the wonderful Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit.
Solid as the Rock of...
Every time I log on to one of my banks these days they remind me, in a bright red text box, they are now owned by Santander, the implicit assumption being that they are "solid" (as it were). Hah!
Mr Madoff is alleged to have confessed to a huge Ponzi scheme (pyramid fraud)... Spanish newspapers said the leading bank Santander had invested with Mr Madoff.
The Beeb's Robert Peston also adds: "Investors will note that regulators have taken long, hard looks at Madoff over many years, and failed to detect fraud." (Source.)
Quiet nights in Chandler's Ford... dept.
One could say the heading's a bit of a "Clichy" I suppose.
Peter was a bit snuffly, I noticed, and I hope I'm not treading the same path. Just in case I am, I decided not to attend the pre-Christmas drinkies that tall Thomas had invited me to (I'd hate to pass any germs along to his one-year-old daughter, particularly at this time of year). So, on the theory that (as all those ancient Reader's Digest columns of my parents seemed to suggest) laughter is the best medicine, I've just gorged on a contiguous dose of BBC2. The "Comedy Connections" examination of the writers responsible for Dad's Army (though I rarely caught any of this series), followed by the extended version of "HIGNFY" chaired by Jerry Springer (who seems to have a lively wit), and topped by the "Buzzcocks" which I've recently developed a liking for, though I can claim little knowledge of much of the music they ask questions about. In parallel, there was the Alan Bennett adaptation of "Wind in the Willows" on BBC7 attaching itself to a minidisc "for my consideration" in due course.
Suddenly, therefore, it's 23:29 and time for the final cuppa.