2009 — 23 September: Wednesday
All other things being equal (which they never are, of course) I'm off back to the vicinity of that chalk horse near Uffington to show two of our chums (not forgetting the dog) the vista — we probably won't be able to see the Didcot cooling towers this time, however; the BBC is forecasting clouds and greyness. But, an early start requires a moderately early night, and such a night starts before midnight. Or in about seven minutes from now.
Staying on the Time theme, come with me back to April 1985 and over to Meisenheim where the three of us were taking a little Easter break from (in my case) the rigours of CICS/CMS documentation down in unsunny Millbrook:
Christa and Gisela, April 1985 in Meisenheim
Christa and her sister-in-law Gisela were part of the full gathering of the clan that month. I'm pretty sure that was the holiday I spent developing my shoot-em-up skills on Junior's little hand-held Tomy Space "dodge the asteroids" game. I also had a couple of Patrick O'Brians, and Evelyn Waugh's "Sword of Honour" trilogy to keep me going, with "David Copperfield" as a backup. Meisenheim, though a delightful little place, wasn't exactly well-stocked with English language reading material.
G'night.
It's certainly a...
... grey start to the day, still, at 09:03 but that's not necessarily a bad thing, given the large number of contour lines on our planned walk. Now, do I go with the prawn sandwich or a more basic ham and cheese? Decisions, heh?
We were 15 minutes late...
... arriving at our agreed rendezvous (the Uffington White Horse NT car park) but, fortunately, our companions in crime were rather later, so could still be teased. So, a 7.6 mile ramble, only partly in the drizzle, 116 miles added to the Yaris total, and I'm back and wrapping myself around a cuppa at 17:01 or thereabouts. NPR seems to have gone off the air... has World War III been declared? I think I should be told.
On the assumption that it hasn't, I may make time to read the new Dawkins. Steve Jones reviewed it in the Torygraph recently. Source and snippet:
Dawkins compares creationists to Holocaust deniers and spoons, with relish, an acid sauce of mockery onto that absurd confection of half-baked ideas. [His book] is largely free of the
atheistical cage-rattling that marked The God Delusion [an entertaining read, by the way] although the notes do include George W Bush's death penalty record and a complete Monty
Python song that starts
"All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot".
Fashion?
For reasons I've never really analysed, I've long been both attracted (and, sometimes, repelled) by the world of fashion. Photographers like Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson (who, in a late career change went on to make his "Porkinson's sausages") all managed to make women look utterly stunning. Back in the mid-1990s Christa and I toddled along to the Harbour Lights cinema to see "Unzipped"1 — the film taking a look behind the scenes as Isaac Mizrahi was putting together his 1994 collection. We also enjoyed Robert Altman's look at this world in "Prêt-à-Porter" around the same time (though not many people shared our opinion). Here's today's "venetian blind drop" delivery, which I heard being discussed on NPR and more locally on the BBC:
I suspect this will be rather more interesting than the 26 pages of "small print" detailing forthcoming changes to "the terms of your agreement with us" — "us" in this case being the bank that Christa stayed loyal to throughout her life in the UK.
Three of the fun-loving criminals
He who wields the camera tends not to appear in the shot, of course! We were trying to reconcile the items on the new display board with the evidence of our eyes, some half a mile or so down from the Chalk Horse:
