2009 — 17 June: Wednesday

I'm tired of being tired, so I'm going to try a radical experiment: an early night. I've always found the sort of warm pollen-filled weather we've been "enjoying" to be horribly enervating. Christa, by contrast, was well used both to hotter summers, and to colder winters, having been brought up in a wine-growing area of Germany totally lacking the benefits of a temperate offshore climate.

Anyway, I shall sign off at 00:22 or so with another picture of her on an equally sunny day back in 1975 in the garden area of our rented flat in Old Windsor:

Christa in Old Windsor in 1975

Garden space wasn't formally allocated to any of the ramshackle collection of flats — all of which (we discovered on our last-ever return visit¹ in November 1996) have now been demolished. To think I took this photo a mere 34 years ago — where on earth does it all go? And why so quickly? It remains a total mystery.

G'night.

Happy birthday, Igor!

Stravinsky, that is. 1882 seems a long time ago now. Yet it's only eleven years before one of my grandmothers was born. She lived long enough to meet her great grandson in 1980 though I have no photo of the occasion.²

Looks (at 08:44) like another "nice" day ahead of me. First cuppa is down already and the sleep debt is at least partially repaid.

Less slicing and dicing?

I was blissfully unaware of the existence of falcarinol, let alone of the World Carrot museum:

The great thing about this is it's a simple way for people to increase their uptake of a compound we know is good for us. All you need is a bigger saucepan.

Dr Kirsten Brandt, quoted by Martin Wainwright in The Guardian

Falcarinol is toxic in large amounts — but to obtain a lethal dose you would have to eat 400 kilograms of carrots at once. (Source.)

Less musical chairs, too?

By contrast, I was blissfully aware of the benefits of a happy marriage:

What I hope in all humility I am drawing attention to is the endless game of 'musical relationships' or 'pass the partner', in which such a significant portion of the population is engaged in the endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship which will be attained, it is supposed, by landing on the right chair or unwrapping a new and more exciting parcel.

Mr Justice Coleridge, quoted by Robert Booth in The Guardian

But then I was very (very) lucky, which I fear cannot be legislated for.

The supplies trail is beckoning if I want to carry on eating. Earwiggo again.

Later

I came over all lazy at lunchtime when I got back from the shops, so I took my main co-pilot out to a snack at the Bridge in Shawford and then we pootled gently round some country lanes, stopping at Hillier's for a reviving cuppa. Now, suddenly, it seems to be 15:45 though all major planned chores for today have been, as it were, chorred (he chortled). I have some hopes of a walk tomorrow, but the rest of today is deliciously free (hang on! isn't every day free?). And, much as I like Rossini's William Tell overture, I shall not miss the fascinating series on America. It's dealing with LBJ in early 1968.

One helluva year! Martin Luther King. Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam. The Democratic convention in Chicago and that thug Richard Daley. (I've never so far felt the need to re-read Mike Royko's masterly study "Boss" since I first did so in 1972, but it malingers on my shelves just in case I ever do.)

Aside to Christa

While not wishing to make any judgement, what do you reckon to a vending machine at Frankfurt airport from which you can buy miniature gold bars? I heard about this on the BBC news and found "confirmation" (if that's le mot juste) in The Times. It's not April Fool's day, surely? It's 22:24, my love, and I'm enjoying Boston Legal just as much as we used to together.

Footnotes

¹ I was giving a talk that I'd called "Paddling into the webbed world" (all about Java) at the annual conference of the ISTC. It was being held that year in Beaumont — exactly where I'd begun my computing career in ICL 22 years earlier (just six weeks or so before I met Christa). I know that they say what goes around comes around, but that flying visit on a Saturday to give the talk was a pretty weird sensation, too, time-wise. While I was doing my chatty thing Christa called in on our son's honorary grandmother Val, who still lives just opposite the vicarage where we'd actually first met in April 1974.
² Oddly (perhaps!) I recall this because that was the day I discovered my little Casio date calculator failed because the lady's birth year was seven years too early for it. She was greatly tickled at the idea that she'd somehow defeated a bit of modern technology. Quite a character: the only grandmother I had who liked watching wrestling on TV and betting on horses. She baked her own bread and made a mean apple pie, too. And took refuge under the kitchen table during thunderstorms, telling me not to touch any cutlery during them. Pure Welsh, of course. She was married to the gentleman you can see here.