2009 — 12 November: Thursday
Mercy me, it's 00:29 or so already. Better get some sleep — it's been quite a long day. Tonight's picture of Christa also lives behind me in the study, as it were, as a poster-sized blow-up.
It dates back to 1976 or so, but I maintain her smile is timeless.
One of my favourite web shops is failing at the "checkout" stage, dammit. Gives me time to remark that teaching in the UK, which is now a graduate-level profession, seems to be failing gloriously in what might be thought of as its Prime Directive. So how will making nursing also now into a graduate-level profession help improve nursing care when, for example, simple matters (like regular hand disinfection between every patient contact) are so often absent?
G'night. By the way, I wish I could say for "Cypress" read "Cyprus" throughout, young Geoff. If you recall your Sellar and Yeatman, which I'm almost sure you do. ("Up a tree, was he?" indeed. Cheek! But I was simply tired.)
Speaking of trees, none of this...
Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has Flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight...
... nonsense. Oh dear me, no. Eastleigh Council employees have simply decided that it's time to trim the bottom of the Leylandii along the railway line, using noisy petrol-driven heavy-duty loppers and so if you're still asleep at 07:59 that's clearly your problem, not theirs. Never mind; I always like a cuppa first thing.
Speaking of "Charisma"...
... which I wasn't. How's this for a 3-CD track listing? The new compilation...
... showed up yesterday while I was striding un-Aragorn-like round the moist country lanes. I would have been happy to pay the asking price for a mere half dozen of the tracks on it.
A freshly-laundered chap...
... browsing and breakfasting, splutters into his cereal on reading an elegant putdown:
"Like Our Lord and Socrates, he does not publish much," joked Maurice Bowra, a colleague and friend of [Isaiah] Berlin's at Oxford.
With friends like that...
Having lunched...
... thank you, Peter, at the Bridge, and successfully picked up a couple of bits of "stuff" in town, I've just driven home in pouring rain and will be keeping the hatches well battened for the rest of the (rather dark) afternoon — it's only 15:21 — the evening too, by the look of it. My friend Cathy has entirely the right idea, flitting off to India for a couple of weeks. November has never been my favourite time of year and, what wiv Christmas an' all, it's enough to make a grumpy, cynical, impoverished old widower vomit. Still, there's always the splendid entertainment that is a rotting guvmint (and equally smelly opposition) to keep the flickering embers of satire gently glowing.
I note that Lindsay Duncan (whom I adore) is portraying Margaret Thatcher (whom I loathe) in a repeat showing tonight of that awesome circus which saw the Iron Lady shatter against European monetary union and turn to discarded rusty dust in just two weeks. In fact, I've re-read Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech to remind me how it's done. It could almost turn me into a cricket fan.
Mind you, if it's satire you want, you have to go some to beat Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn:
I see the editors have now decided that all three main characters (whose fictional obits are included at the end) shuffled off the stage on the same day in November 1995 — this is at odds with their fates as described in my three treasured volumes of the "Diaries" as published quarter of a century ago! Artistic licence, indeed. Over the years since then I've bought, and given away as gifts, more copies of these diaries than of any other books in my little library.
What an amazingly articulate saxophonist John Surman is!
My tum is starting to remind me of its need for input... it's already 18:22 but I had a large lunch, dammit! What a design.