2009 — 14 May: Thursday
Right, here's tonight's artistically-rotated picture of Christa, dating from the summer of 1976, shortly after we'd moved into our nice little three-bed semi in Old Windsor.
For a change, the evening's entertainment (as I continued to scan my weary way through the endless folders of DVD cover1 artwork) was listening to my audio recording of The Silver Chair (yes, the CS Lewis story) read by Jeremy Northam. As I said, this was the one "Narnia" story that I never managed to get hold of as a child. Given the comparative darkness of its theme, I'm not really surprised.
A mere 25 minutes to go! G'night.
Smell that... crockpot?
Well, not quite yet. I've only just started the heating process. It's 10:36 and looks rather dull out there, but dry so far. I've actually tuned away from "Woman's Hour" as the emotions coming from the widow being interviewed are just too much. I also had to tune away earlier from the historians chattering away to the chap "Private Eye" calls Melvyn Barg as I cannot take phrases like "I'm not sure the Turks were trying to spread Islam" for some strange reason. (I've always had a problem with historians who present neatly-wrapped packages of conjecture and personal opinion as fact. Must be the boring nascent engineer in me.) I've always preferred the cock-up theory to the conspiracy theory as there is little evidence2 to suggest sufficient intelligence for the latter. Or, at least, not on a large scale.
Unhealthy, or what?
Back in the 1960s (yes, I remember them) I had an unhealthily precocious interest in psychology. I grew out of it, of course, before I left school for what's laughingly referred to as the "real" world. But I still wonder what makes people tick, as it were. So I found this a fascinating study. Source and snippet:
Vaillant brings a healthy dose of subtlety to a field that sometimes seems to glide past it. The bookstore shelves are lined with titles that have an almost messianic tone, as in Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Ask an American how it's going, and you will usually hear "Really good." Ask a Dane, and you will hear "It could be worse." "Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come," a team of Danish scholars concluded. "Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark."
At this point, and with some lovely marimba music, I think breakfast will make me happy. Wandering the aisles of WH Smith yesterday, I found an entire shelving section of books under the generic title "Tragic Life Stories" — Jesus wept! Misery porn, whatever next? Well, in my case, a little light lunch sooner rather than later. It's already 12:13 though how that happens is a mystery.
Definitely grumpy
High finance in the (stinks to) high (heaven) Tory MP world: Two second home allowances and no main home. "I completely accept, now that it's been drawn to my attention..." What a complete tosser!
Meanwhile, when did it become necessary for a 30-minute radio documentary examining the green footprint of us oldies (that is not exactly an intellectual stretch in the first place) to stop at the half-way point to recap? Very annoying.
Spot the difference
From the New York Times:
British members of Parliament earn $92,795 a year. In a recent 12-month period, they claimed an average of nearly $200,000 in expenses, a figure that included expenses related to running their offices, including staff salaries and office supplies, as well as living expenses for legislators who represent districts outside London.
In the United States, members of the House of Representatives make $174,000 a year. They also receive, on average, between $1.4 million and $1.9 million a year to run their offices and pay for travel to and from Washington, depending on how far away their districts are. But they are expected to pay for their own housing and living expenses, said Kyle Anderson, a spokesman for the Committee on House Administration.
Crikey! A new John Wyndham book? But why so ridiculously expensive?
As I half-listen to the depressing litany of, what... corruption? Incompetence? Dishonesty? Stupidity? emanating from both the upper and lower Houses in Westminster, I find my mind drifting gently back to last July. Oh, for lost innocence!
Never mind... there's always BBC Radio 3 to fall back on. Tonight's "Night Waves" looks promising. Right. Time (18:41) to crack open that crockpot, methinks. Yum. Nicely accompanied by Stravinsky's Symphony in three movements from the Barbican last week. The rest is now chilling down, the dishes are done, and I can relax (some might say I need do nothing else, of course). It seems to have stopped drizzling, but worse is to come according to the BBC. Ever onward.