2010 — 3 March: Wednesday
I've been catching up with, and enjoying, the recent BBC4 series on the "great" offices of state. I began, however, with the drama about MPs' expenses. Like they said, "you couldn't make it up". Well done, Heather Brooke.
I also tried a couple of DVDs Mike lent me, but lasted no more than 10 minutes with either. Could have been a "mood" thing, I suppose.
Having just been invited to my chum Nick's retirement lunch next month, at a restaurant not a million miles from the Spinnaker Tower, I think I may pop down there on a little reconnoitre. When Christa and I would go down there (and, over the years, we took numerous visitors to see the dockyard and HMS Victory) we'd almost invariably park on "this" side in Gosport, alongside Haslar road, and take the Millennium path to the ferry terminal, making a little ferry trip part of the experience. So I have little experience of the "other" side of the river, and none at all as a driver (of course).
Ho hum. G'night at 00:23 or so. It's been a long day somehow, but a good one.
One hesitates to say the word...
... "Spring" yet the feel in the air and the sunlight both seem to be hinting, as it were, at the end of the Ice Queen's current reign. In younger generation news, my son and his ladyfriend will be here for lunch on Sunday. And I suspect my chum Peter from "over the road" will soon be putting Monday's new car battery to the test as he's just told me his elderly mother died a few hours ago. The fact that it was inevitable, necessary, and expected doesn't stop it from being a ghastly business. Nice one, &deity!
But the first cuppa is already a fading memory (when was that ever not so?) and there remains the question of breakfast. It's 08:54 and counting. Yesterday's new lump of dental hardware seems to have settled in — I hope, for the duration. Doubtless it's made from sterner stuff than I am.
Had I but Time enough...
... to paraphrase Mr Marvell and his coy mistress. What I still think of as my "new" life (post-Christa) remains capable of throwing the odd poignant or melancholy "first"1 in my face. Today's (of course) was my solo trip down to Gosport and across to Portsea on the little ferry there. Turns out the restaurant is at the base of the (now completed) tower I photographed on 2nd April 2007 when we took niece #1 there:
Took me a while to find it, though, and a brief chat with a young security lad riding happily around on a Segway.2 I can confirm that Gunwharf Quays is still utterly lacking any half decent form of bookshop, too. I've always judged a shopping place by the quality of its bookshops (if any). Still, there was an HMV that revealed the welcome existence of a new "Imagined Village" CD, now on order from Amazon. I last played the original album just a couple of nights ago.
I got back, ravenously hungry (and somewhat chilled), shortly after 14:00 and collected a lovely "opinion" from the second of the Great Office of State programmes while munching lunch:
The Foreign Office regards the arrival of each new minister like an oyster regards the arrival of a grain of sand. The intrusion of an irritant, with a very low statistical probability of ever producing a pearl.
I bet he polished that little gem during his 32 years in the Diplomatic Service.
Rube Goldberg
I wonder how many takes it took to get this gadgetry working properly? Well worth a look, even if it's very reminiscent of my "The Way Things Go" DVD. Thanks for the link, Zeno!