2009 — 29 January: Thursday

Nearly time for the last pill of the day — certainly time for tonight's picture of Christa:

Christa and the "S1", 1976

She's wearing the T-shirt handed out by the ICL "S1" team that she did some work for (actually without telling me at the time!) while we were both busily trying to make ends meet having just bought our first house in Old Windsor.

I know she had four part-time jobs1 on the go at one point: her (main) language work in Royal Holloway College (three days a week), typing and secretarial work in an estate agent in Englefield Green (which had the benefit of getting us a free survey when we bought the house), ditto in a Windsor solicitors office (which had the benefit of getting us relatively cheap house conveyancing when we bought the house), and topped off with some evening German language teaching at a local college. To this day I have no clear idea2 what she did for the ICL folk. She was a busy, energetic, and highly pragmatic girl.

G'night, somewhat after midnight, and again ahead of forecast heavy rain. We shall see...

Grey day

It's 10:06 and not raining, but the cloud cover is making it a somewhat gloomy morning. Pill is loaded; breakfast is loading; home delivery network chap has dropped off a hefty tome; walk has been put on "hold" for today, but I'll get my fresh air quota on a supplies run at some point.

Mr Postie's just got into the act, too. To my delight, I am nearly £40 in credit with Southern Water, having used a grand total of 9m3 of the splashy wet stuff since 21st July last year. Christa would be delighted. (In 2007, I was paying about £48 per month for the two of us; now I'm paying about £12-50 and steadily accumulating a credit. Good decision.)

Koestlerian?

Given the dual mentions here (of Thomson's fat book and my [apparently Welsh] ancestry), today's deliveries strike me as vaguely coincidental. The (six) DVD set was astonishing value:

DVDs and book

I'm (almost) willing to bet that one of these items will evoke interest from Lis in NewZealandland. Getting hungry. Time to shovel in some food ahead of the next pill — somehow it's already 12:29, though I couldn't say how that happened. If you can't quite read the text at the bottom of the Thomson book cover, by the way, try this:

Tag line

I've yet to skim it to see how many I already have on DVD. I may own up later.

R.I.P. John Martyn

Just back from Roger and Eileen (thanks for the cuppa and chat) to catch this unwelcome news on the radio. Another fine person has left the building...

Later that evening...

I've just passed the 13,000 miles total (13,017). Perhaps I should treat the Yaris to its second wash? And (astonishingly) I have just discovered Winston Churchill's last recorded utterance in the House of Commons. Start here!

I've been poking around with the "Freecorder" toolbar but without much joy. My XP sound card just didn't want to know, and uninstallation got into a bit of a twisted mess, too. But I'm not admitting defeat quite yet. Great Scott, when did it become 22:52?

The David Thomson tome is an absolute delight. Here's a random paragraph, from the end of the essay on Bladerunner:

Bladerunner was not nominated in the year Gandhi won Best Picture. That is the only mention of Gandhi in this book.

David Thomson in "Have you seen?"


One thousand one-page essays, a chronology, and a nice introduction. Fabulous, and much to think about and argue with — except for Bladerunner, of course! My kind of book.

  

Footnotes

1  Shades of Betty MacDonald's sister Mary — the inspiration behind that lovely book Anybody can do anything.
2  My bit of ICL was in an entirely different sector, and the "S1" was a new mainframe whose details were being kept under wraps at the time. So I wasn't encouraged to ask.