2009 — 9 April: Thursday

Not merely after midnight this time, but already after 01:30 in fact. In later years, Christa would occasionally say how much she regretted I'd missed out on some of the fun she and Peter had got up to while I was doing whatever it was I did in the office. Here, for example, I'm pretty sure they were out on the Solent, but I don't have a clue when, or for that matter, who took the picture. I know I certainly didn't.

Solent

I'm not entirely sure Peter was happy here — maybe he wanted to steer, or something! But the two of them got out and about as often as they could, and I honestly didn't mind a bit. She was a marvellous mother.

G'night.

Very (un)Interesting, Lucy... but stupid

I suppose some people still remember Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-in"? Anyway, as I listen to Alice in Wonderland while she falls down the rabbit hole it seems entirely appropriate to contemplate what would have seemed unthinkable while Christa and I struggled with our mortgage in earlier years:

Rates

And to read the amusing Woody Allen story about lobsters' revenge on Mr Madoff...

This was quite interesting, too. Snippet and source:

It is the weekend, but I can't afford to take my daughter swimming as planned because it would dent my weekly budget too much. Instead, we clean the house, run around the garden and watch telly while eating chicken sandwiches. I spend the evening eating rice and peas while listening to podcasts (In Our Time and Philosophy Bites), followed by a rubbery piece of cheddar and some grapes I snaffled from yesterday's meeting. Yummy (I'm being ironic). In bed by 9pm for more face-time with my huge inpile of books.

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian


A small prize...

... to Amazon, for their most bizarre sales attempt yet... a DVD from a chap called Tim Warneka: "A Catholic Christmas Carol: Catholic Servant Leaders & Emotional Intelligence". Just in time for Easter! A snip at $99-95, too. Equally bizarre, they assert that it's because they've noticed a correlation between this and purchasers of that amiable nonsense "The Sixth Sense"1 (which I bought, we watched, and will doubtless never watch again). I gave up on M. Night Shyamalan after "Unbreakable". Christa didn't even make it all the way through that.

Later

It's 15:44 and I've recently returned from a foody supplies run before lunch followed by a mooch around "PC World" and "Currys" at Hedge End after lunch. As the motorway was rapidly clogging up, I came back via West End, passing the hospice where Christa died, in fact. Then, because it's the sort of chap I am, and also wishing to dodge the long queue that had been building up past the Fleming Park leisure centre, I also dipped into "Asda", thus reminding myself of all the reasons I don't generally go there, though (I admit) Christa did, and I even spotted where she must have bought a useful set of plastic storage crates of the type I've stuffed all my surplus cables into, under Junior's bed.

I've also fielded yet another email request regarding some of the vintage BBC material cluttering the dustier parts of my shelves. In this case, oddly, I actually loaned the two tapes in question to a student at Oxford university a couple of months ago, so I literally cannot answer the questions I've been asked. But I did learn that one of the tapes may actually hold the only remaining recording of a piece — "The afterlife" by Barry Bermange, one of three of his "inventions for radio" made in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — absent from the BBC's own archives. An odd thought.

Just (20:01) heard a delightful John Mortimer anecdote on BBC7. A couple were accosted and told to hand over the wife's purse. The husband told the court that, as his wife's purse was in her shopping bag on the ground, he bent down as if to retrieve it, put his hands up her skirt, detached her false leg, and hit the would-be thief with it. "It had only been my intention to scare him off", he explained, "but unhappily for all, he passed over". As John said: "Well, it could happen to anyone!"

Later still...

All scan and no play makes David a dull boy so, having got to the end of letter "L" I took time out for another Battlestar episode before resuming. It's 22:57 and Gideon Coe is playing some mighty fine music on BBC 6Music. However, just like last year, I have to wonder where my Easter egg is, Christa! (It's really not the same when you buy them for yourself...)

  

Footnote

1  And, yes, we deduced the Bruce Willis character was dead quite some time before the end — which seemed a long time coming.