2010 — 9 January: Saturday
How come it's already past midnight again? Beats me. But Charlie Gillett is playing some excellent music for another minute or so yet, and I'm not sleepy. Big Bro worries about me and the Third World country I live in... He says: Keep warm! Strongly suggest that you invest in a gas bottled (sic) equipped BBQ as an emergency piece of kit for when/if your piped gas supply fails. This winter shows signs of digging in and I would suspect that the utilities will soon start to crack under the strain.
Now (as I admitted many years ago on a fatuous IBM team-building course) I have not a smidgen of survivalist tendency, inclination, or instinct in me. I have not the slightest interest in outlasting my "civilisation"1 now that Peter is an independent adult and Christa has, as it were, gone on ahead of me. I reserve the right to change my attitude should I ever be presented with a grandchild, of course :-)
Naturally, I also have the utmost faith in the total efficiency of our great country's infrastructure now that it's all been so relentlessly and generously invested in (to the detriment of management salaries and bonuses these many years since the lady described as a provincial bigot sold off all the UK's assets to her chums) so I replied2 "I have the gas cooker and the electric microwave. If gas and electric both fail I shall simply drown myself in the bath, except that the water will also be off, no doubt. Or emigrate. No worries." (Or is that an Australian idiom?)
Of course, he may yet prove to be right. G'night.
Re-surfacing...
... shortly before 09:00 I find the sun shining, the frost frosting, and the first hour of the Brian Matthew "Sounds of the 60s" show almost over. But I don't find a cuppa, so that's my next priority. Now that I've read Audiophoolery by Ethan Winer. I liked the comment:
I equate audio systems with a bottle of wine. If you pay any more than $25 only the oenophiles and sommeliers can tell the difference. They can only achieve this when they sniff it, twirl it and then spit it out in a clinical manner. Sophisticated I suppose but that is not how I want to enjoy wine. Just as sitting in a hermetically sealed room listening to a $10,000 system so you can hear the faint foot tapping of the trumpet player seems nitpicky.
Having mentioned Phil the Greek in my footnote a few hours ago, the latest chunk (4 May 1983) of the Gyles Brandreth diaries told me something I had managed not to know for the first 58 years of my life: your partner cannot be presented to HRH at an "event" unless she is your spouse. How quaint! I'm still with Denis Diderot on the monarchy. (Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.)
With the end of Brian M's programme I suppose it's time to do something about breakfast. It's gloriously sunny but still horribly sub-zero out there. Up to eight inches more snow still to come in the south east? Blimey. My upload speed to the web server in Texas has become very sluggish. Wrong kind of snow on the cable, perhaps?
Later
It's post-lunch (14:09) and the temperature has soared up to -2C. The road (by which I mean my local little hill) is still basically a sheet of ice. I'm predicting a spot of pedestrian shopping activity in the not too distant future. Mind you, the state of the pavements is diabolical, too. The only piece of paper so far delivered here for several days has been this morning's election leaflet from a Mr Brine — a young Tory, I believe. It's on my little recycle pile, unread.
Try telling that to kids today... dept.
Having browsed the BBC's piece about the winter of 1962/3 (how odd to see a photo of Wheathampstead Post Office, just a couple of miles up the road from our house in Harpenden the following year) I, too, recall frozen water pipes in our first Wilmslow house in the mid-1950s, and the fact that it had no central heating despite having been built in 1954 or so. And I still recall, too, the nasty winter that was 1962/3. I had a mystery virus. Dear mama sprained an ankle. Dad was in hospital in Manchester having a bit of schoolboy-battered loose cartilege removed from his knee joint, and then promptly back in recovering from the blood clot that the physiotherapist dislodged — which would (we were assured) have killed him had it landed in his heart, but which stopped in, and killed off, a bit of his lung instead. We were living in Alderley Edge at the time, and my favourite Aunt and Uncle, both now dead, generously came up from Wolverhampton to stay to help out... I remember Lindow Common froze over, too.
I also recall the winter of 1968/9 in Harpenden and Big Bro giving me a lift to my school in St Albans through snow in his pride and joy: a new Triumph Spitfire a few months before shipping it, and himself, down to Christchurch NZ. Discounting the several Christmas holidays with Christa at her parental home in Meisenheim from 1974 onwards (invariably far colder than anything we tended to get in the UK) the next cold blast I recall was during our first winter in the house here (1981/2) a few months after I'd joined IBM. It was so cold (-12C) that the water-based glue on our cavity wall insulation beads didn't stick properly, so in the 28 years since, whenever I've had cause to drill through an outside wall, they have had a tendency to make a dash for freedom.
Now (17:11 or so) it's a mere -3C out there and I note planes are still managing to get out of the local airport. But there's almost zero traffic, or traffic noise for that matter. Not even the wailing of emergency sirens. Still, as long as I have a nice, hot, cuppa... I'm catching up on some wonderful music from recent editions of "Late Junction" and generally chilling :-) The night is young.
Later still
It's 19:45. Evening meal eaten? Check. Dishes done? Check. Anything on TV? You've gotta be joking. But I'm sure I can find a film or two. Or something...