2010 — 1 April: Thursday — rabbits!

I'm editing this despite the fact that I currently (00:57) have no Internet connection,1 having just listened to an excellent BBC 6Music documentary about The Who. It's jolly cold up here, but I've survived worse. Besides, that's what a nice thick multi-tog quilt is for. Oddly, I see it's precisely two years ago today that I was attending another IBM retirement lunch. Who said there's no such thing as a free lunch? :-)

G'night.

The sun is shining...

... the network connection is back (so far) and, at 08:37, I feel in urgent need of a cuppa to get rid of the ice. [Pause]

Aah, that's much better. Now, can I be bothered to try to identify the various April Fool's day stories? No, not really. Life's already foolish enough though (without looking further), I already half suspect the Guardian claim that a tax break is being given to the computer game industry. (The Darling chap currently in nominal charge of the Treasury for the next few weeks is such a ball of fun I suppose it could be true.) As for free maps from the Ordnance Survey... well, I know a chap with strong views on that subject (one of their — probably myriad, by now — ex-bosses).

Woman with a chopper...

Nominative determinism strikes again:

Salaries

Isn't "unelected quango" one of those oxy-moronic things? Like "honest MP"? She obviously has a thing about the inexorable workings of Parkinson's Law. Good luck to her, I say. But recall Hercules' (as I prefer his name) Second Labour, and the lesson of the Hydra.

Timely

Though I hope I won't need it, the snailmail today had a note from Toyota about the change to my "roadside assistance" to the AA with effect from today. Right; time I smartened myself up and, as it were, hit the road. It's 10:57 but I don't want to rush, and I have to factor in catching the little ferry across from Gosport to Portsea. Toot, toot!

Safely back

And with a slowly developing appetite, too. It's now 19:09 and I shall leap into action just as soon as the next cuppa has been enjoyed. Weather has been bright, quite windy, and rather cool — but dry. Quite a lot of traffic. I was lucky to escape a parking fine as I over-ran my ticket time by nearly 40 minutes by the time I'd caught the ferry back and walked briskly to the Haslar Road carpark. But a nice meal (simple bangers and mash and a mango pud) and congenial company, including two of my ex-colleagues from my "Communications" days. Mine host (Nick) reminded me that, on the day of his job interview in Hursley in 1984 he'd asked to spend a few minutes with one of his future colleagues2 just for a chat.

Meanwhile, young Brack in NZ points out that I should have said "redundant" rather than "oxy-moronic", but that wouldn't have been quite as funny, would it?

Yet more House room?

As I mentioned nearly three years ago, during Christa's last months I lost my enthusiasm for this TV show (though she continued to enjoy it, even when in hospital). I regained my taste last July. And an item about "Cuddy" (Lisa Edelstein) in Radio Times a couple of days ago (and another massive discount) prompted me to click "Buy" on this new set, though the mind boggles at what they could possibly have done to merit / necessitate an "18" censorship rating:

DVD

A chance remark at lunch has also prompted me to play Pink Floyd's "The Wall" this evening. When this fabulous album first came out on double vinyl in late 1979 (!) I remember listening to it all the way through several times while ill in bed with ghastly 'flu. Now, it's playing on CD downstairs, being routed to the minidisc recorder down there, thence to the audio router, and up the cable along the stairs to the Denon CD/tuner/amplifier here in the study.3 All for the sake of having matching synchronised sound saturating the house. I do like Pink Floyd, and was delighted that Christa did too, after hearing the records I had when we first met. I've been listening to them for 43 years, which strikes me as frankly preposterous. Unless I'm getting old.

  

Footnotes

1  My ISP warned me a week or so ago that I'd suffer some outage any time from 1st April onward while they rollout their upgrade to the speed of the broadband connection. Not that I'll be able to exploit any such increased speed until Junior finishes sorting out the new router he's been working on for me...
2  Guess who my manager lobbed that task to? I may yet dig out a photo taken of me at about that time for one of the numerous in-house magazines that came and went over the years (more or less synchronised with the senior managers whose egos prompted them to sponsor the things).
3  The newly roomy study, I might add, with two hefty bookcases and their contents all now relocated downstairs. For all that Christa resisted the idea of my "cluttering up" the living room with books to match just about every room in the rest of the house (not least her own study!) I must say, I prefer having them down there and feeling able to walk around up here without knocking something over and being buried alive under a tide of dead trees smeared with information.