2009 — 23 April: Thursday
An early night, as I'm quite knackered after the walk. Just time for tonight's picture of Christa, taken in about 1978 in the Old Windsor house:
Let's hope I remember to put the handbrake on if we get as far as Poole Harbour later today. G'night.
Misty start
But the world goes wagging on. A scrappage scheme worth £300,000,000 just for the car industry? Crazy! A new set of coal-fired power stations. A month-long general election in India where, in Bihar, one in three candidates has a criminal record. I need a cuppa!
I have yet to decipher the meaning that is, I assume, buried here: Grandparents of working age who spend time looking after their grandchildren will find their time spent with them counts towards the calculation of their state pension. But then I'm not a grandparent...
The sun has just burst through the mist. Hooray. I shall nip out for some "motion lotion" and then the intrepid duo will set off. Right! 10:20 — let's hit the road.
Mission accomplished
It's 14:37 and the car is cooling down on the drive. Castle Cameras has been suitably enriched, my co-pilot has his new Canon compact with its 9 million pixies, and we made our rather over-circuitous way to a Christchurch quay-side café for the Old Mill club sandwiches lunch, a little further along the coast from Mudeford, and then a peaceful gander at some swans before heading back. The sun shone (mostly) though it was misty in and around Bournemouth, with hardly any visibility out to sea (that I could see).
Being on a roll, I stopped merely for a swig of OJ and then headed down into town to recce for my favourite pair of magazines. No such luck, alas, so at 16:34 I can now kick back and relax as I listen to tales of things heading for Planet Earth and what (if anything) we can do about them. Including the legal aspects. But spoiled, just a tad, by the young gentleman's bizarre pronunciation of "nuclear", in a definite homage to Bush's variant.
Win some, lose some
The new ISP doesn't seem (so far) to be on any email blacklists. But it's not taken very long for the volume of email spam to start going up. Mind you, my Thunderbird email client is still pretty good at flagging the rubbish. It's 19:15, the inner man has been fed, and whispering Bob Harris is going strong.
Hah! I've just scanned the cover artwork for the film I mentioned the morning after Christa's death (because the radio that morning had played a piece of Brahms used to excellent effect in the film). We both loved this movie. But a better statistician than I will have to explain the bizarre "7.5/10" that it has been rated on IMDB... I know they "manipulate" their weighted averages to avoid vote-rigging but, come on, who's going to be bothering to do that on a 1951 Cary Grant film???
They obviously don't believe that people who know this film will almost without exception give it a high rating. This is particularly ironic when you consider the subject matter.
Right! Time to energise those plasma pixels downstairs. It's 22:38 and I shall give that new Noël Coward film a whirl, and maybe download the new Ubuntu at the same time.