2009 — 8 June: Monday
As I'm nearly asleep, I shall just publish my next photo of Christa, from June, 2007:
Christa in the garden, June 2007
... and then call it a night, despite the lure of Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour. G'night.
Third time lucky
I woke twice, and can report the dawn chorus is already tuning up at 01:30 or so. At 04:15 I simply made a cuppa and read for a while. Now it's 10:35 but at least I no longer feel tired. It's bright and sunny, but with loads of clouds. Ho-hum. Much to do.
As I munch my breakfast, this piece reminds me of that lovely satirical 1960 novel "The Evolution Man" (aka "Once upon an ice age" aka "What we did to Father") by Roy Lewis and the accidental discovery of cooking related therein when young William's piggy-wig got himself trussed up to a large piece of firewood.
It's 12:40 and Mr Postie has been and gone. He dropped off a DVD of the set of short films that were nominated for "Oscars" in 2005. I bought this to get hold of Six shooter by Martin McDonagh — the chap who went on to make In Bruges. To my delight, the collection also included the original variant of Cashback by Sean Ellis. (I bought and enjoyed the full-length version of this nine months ago.)
Later
It seems to be 17:38 and I'm recently back from a minor-league adventure out for afternoon tea. The rain has held off so far (perhaps the huge new computer at the Met Office needs a rethink). Another minister has gone walkabout (with conflicting stories about whether or not she was asked to sign a pledge of loyalty and whether or not she refused to do so — shades of one of many gorgeous scenes in Joseph Heller's Catch-22.)
In the context of guvmint monitoring emails and phone calls...
A Home Office memo leaked during the period when the former home secretary, Jacqui Smith, was swooning over GCHQ's megalomaniac plans held them to be "impractical, disproportionate, politically unattractive and possibly unlawful". The plans have since been modified so that data collection would be outsourced to internet service providers, who are, by the way, none too happy about it...
A brief moment considering the morals and competence of so many of our leaders must be enough to persuade us that to give such power away would be extreme folly...
Happy 60th birthday "1984"!
Later still
How come I've got done so little of what I intended to do? And it's 22:04 already. Very mysterious.