2010 — 24 March: Wednesday
I'd intended to try for an early night but, again, midnight has come a'tapping like Poe's Raven as I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. Or, in this case, the innards of the Oppo Blu-ray manual while trying to answer one of Brian's questions about audio formats...
G'night.
Brightly dawns...
... the fresh day, not too near dawn (at 08:21), with the warm-up-the-brain Su Doku done, the cuppa at hand, and a sprightly Bach Prelude and Fugue in C minor (2nd of the 48) just concluded. By contrast, wrap your mind around this bit of debunking (there's almost a pun there, of sorts). Source and snippet:
The sport-sex-slavery scare springs from officials' and campaigners' warped minds rather than from anything remotely resembling evidence... Profoundly this scare speaks to an elite fear of unpredictable movements across borders, of working-class male behaviour, and of Third World women being easily tricked into a life of sexual bondage. Already, for the London 2012 Olympics, the UK government is scaremongering about 'international criminal gangs... tricking and abducting women from abroad and selling them for sex in London', to use Harriet Harman's hysterical words.
The image of an hysterical Harriet Harman is quite enough to suppress any sort of appetite, don't you think? Almost including that for breakfast. There's more on a classic image of class division here. Who said the camera never lies? Meanwhile, Christa would have loved this story not least for the telling detail that it features a chap who "was once the youngest box maker in Bavaria".
I think I shall do a supplies run before breakfast as the weather doesn't look too promising.
To hell with the weather...
It's gloriously sunny out there right now (10:14) so we're going to risk a dunking with a local walk. Breakfast is eaten; no packed lunch, just something to munch or nibble, and off we go. No point being retired if you don't enjoy yourself, is there?
[Pause]
Right, that's another six miles of shoe leather eroded, plus I swung by the foody shop on the way back for the items I failed to remember a few hours ago. It's fair to say the BBC got the weather forecast completely wrong. It was warm and dry, with included yellow butterflies thrown in for free. Sadly, Brock the badger is still dead (we did Sunday's walk widdershins to make it look less familiar). Is there no end to our geographic daring? Laundry is now laundering and I guess it's time (14:11) for a bite to eat as I'm ravenous.
My lunchtime treat was to watch some of that "Mad Men Fix the World" film from yesterday evening. I saw enough to know I want to savour the rest of it. By contrast, I gave up on the "Hamster's" silly Invisible Worlds programme within less than ten minutes. Rearrange the words "down" and "dumbed".1 Most disappointing. Mike and I agreed on our walk today that there's nothing wrong with being grumpy old men — this is just as well, of course. There are a myriad daily opportunities to exercise this trait.
Put kettle on, mother!
Forecast for tonight?
Cloudy, some heavy rain, a meal and a film (or two) over in Winchester. Better than shivering in an unheated house listening to drips from a draining heating system... :-)
It's just turned six o'clock, but I can't say I'm excited about the Darling man's budget. Fiddling while Rome burns, if you ask me.