2009 — 10 February: Tuesday
Wotta lotta rain! I'm going for an early night tonight — if I feel chirpy enough later I've said I'll ride shotgun up to Wantage with my main co-pilot. He's on a musical acquisition mission for a certain significant birthday coming up over the road. So, just time for tonight's picture of Christa:
I took this in 1974 during our first-ever daytrip / picnic we enjoyed on the 1st of June from High Wycombe to Oxford. G'night.
Curious, isn't it?
When (in the past) my throat was this sore,1 I'd typically keep it away from my colleagues for a day or so. Today: the hell with it! My reasoning is I don't have a temperature, and I feel OK, so I'm off on an adventure. (What doesn't kill you makes you stronger — we shall see!) I have prepped the next crockpot, so should have a nice hot meal ready for the evening. Besides, I still have a variety of throat medicine "stuff" malingering around. But, most important, I have a new approach to life — after all, I'm retired! And I figure I owe it to Christa to have enough fun for the two of us.
Home again
Back from the one-track highways and (snow-covered) byeways of West Berkshire and south Oxfordshire. Having completed the acquisition from Highly Strung International it was time to find somewhere for lunch, and that's where the fun started. Next time he says "Let's go the pretty way" I'm instructed to tell him "Let's not!" But we ended up in Newbury (nearly 28 years after the first time2 I can recall stopping there [as opposed to driving, or trying to drive, through it en route [usually] to or from dear Mama — before the Newbury bypass existed) in a riverside eatery next to the Canal Bar. I also saw my first gibbet, but it was too cold to hang around.
It's 15:35 and a lot sunnier down here than in Oxfordshire, with no trace of snow still here, either.
Tomorrow's adventure will be my next hospital visit to have the infected finger re-inspected. But hopefully not re-infected. What fun.
Come back Tord Alvar Quan Liddell!
Entertaining though it is to listen on my little steam wireless to ex-chairmen of two obscenely large UK banks admit to having no formal banking qualifications, and pleasing though it is to picture them wriggling at least slightly in their pin-striped splendour, and completely astonishing though it is to be told that one of these decent chaps is still being paid £60,000 per month as a consultant by his bank, I find myself idly reconsidering the relevance and rôle of the gibbet in modern British society! Definitely time for a bit of blood sugar elevation. Monsieur le Crockpot, here I come. It's 18:26 and I'm hungry. I would shout at the radio, but my throat is a bit too sore just now.
Speaking of mad men, and men who make me mad, I see series #2 starts tonight on the HD channel.