2009 — 31 July: Friday
It's just gone midnight, but I'm pretty tired. Tonight's picture of Christa shows her in the Old Windsor kitchen about 32 years ago, on the weekend we had my penpal Kay1 staying with us after her graduation from Stirling University:
Christa in Old Windsor, 1977ish
I'm not sure exactly what's planned for later today, though it certainly includes lunch with my chum Len. Not certain when John and I are driving up to London. Could be on Saturday morning, I suppose. It also occurs to me that it's exactly a year since I last visited my ex-ICL chum Ian. I should pop over and retrieve my House DVDs, for example. Oh well, time for sleep. G'night.
Awake!
Well, it doesn't seem to be raining. I'd better get up and at 'em pronto before Bro and Len show up. It's already 09:39 and most of my sleep deficit has been dealt with.
Hi, Mr Postie. What'cha got there?
- I really hate my job
Oliver Parker wrote and directed the excellent 1999 version of Wilde's An ideal husband and the almost as good The importance of being Earnest in 2002 - Backbeat
Iain Softley directed Hackers and K-PAX. I'd borrowed "Backbeat" from Mike; I knew very little about the story of the Beatles in Hamburg - Intimate affairs
A promising cast; I live in hope, but the IMDB reviewer is scathing
Right. It's 12:13 and Big Bro turned up half an hour ago. Now we await Len before deciding on our lunch venue.
The ladder has left...
... the garage. Neither of us particularly fancies climbing up it, however, to inspect and fix the upstairs bedroom window frame. What a pair of wusses. Lunch was lunched at "The Hut" and then I whizzed down into town in hopes of finding my next issue of The Word. Nope; I have to wait another two weeks. So I consoled myself with a book, a mag, and a DVD:
- A Book of Silence, by Sara Maitland
I remembered the article I'd read in The Guardian last November that had been extracted from her book - The Golden Compass
This is another film I borrowed from Mike; I'm very disappointed that apparently the two sequels won't now be made. Chris Weitz directed New Moon — the sequel to Twilight due to open this November. He also was a producer on the lovely film Nick & Norah's infinite playlist - "Spy Special"
I bought this as I'm a (very) long-time fan of the late Donald E Westlake, aka Richard Stark, aka Tucker Coe etc etc
It's 17:16 and the ladder remains stubbornly unclambered up.
Recent update: He's now (17:27) up there chiselling away at the old putty. What a super star! I'm on the hook to do the sanding and painting later on (not
to mention the meal tonight, of course). Fair's fair.
I happened to see Josie Long for the first time on last night's "Buzzcocks" (though that was already a repeat). She's also cropped up in this intriguing piece. Source and snippet:
With the mumbo-jumbo of alternative medicine nestling into previously sane minds and the garbled nonsense of Intelligent Design inching its way ever closer to British schools, beleaguered rationalists could be forgiven for thinking those days are gone for good. Surprisingly, however, the vanguard of the Enlightenment's fightback includes a small group of young, bright and strangely lo-fi comedians — most of whom will be performing at this year's Edinburgh Fringe — based around an occasional roaming comedy night called the School for Gifted Children.
Another one gone
Though I'm always pleased to read the latest "Ansible" I like it less when it tells me that a(nother) favourite author has died. R.I.P. Phyllis Gotlieb, whose first novel was the 1964 Sunburst. I re-read this about once a decade. It's somewhat akin to the Wilmar Shiras classic "Children of the Atom" — another favourite of mine.
Right! Since I can't currently recall who I've lent my copy of "Charlie Wilson's war" to (though I expect it may be young Ms Peek because of the Aaron Sorkin connection), tonight we shall watch a copy that Len was kind enough to whisk off his Sky box recently.