2010 — 4 August: Wednesday

The glorious Stravinsky1 on the BBC and the second cuppa are between them working the necessary magic I need to face a tottering pile of tasks today. It's 08:51 and I suppose I'd better get cracking. "No rest", as has been remarked, "for the wicked".

Dear Mama, meanwhile, is faced with a simpler task (singular) today: her choice of pre-lunch sherry (I kid you not!) but may not realise/remember she has to go down on to the lawn of her new home for it. It's called incentivising. I trust god is smiling...

Bottomless pits of research spending?

How delighted I am to learn that the Medical Research Council is scrutinising the UK population so closely. (Source.)

The limits of even my...

... appreciation of the black humour deployed at various intervals by our so-called "Intelligent Designer" in the course of the typical life cycle2 of the average naked killer ape swarming like a nasty plague over this planet are rapidly approaching.

It's 14:32, and I've just been grabbing a quick bite back at Technology Towers before setting off on yet further Mama-related sh1t. Putting my feet up (as it were) I can now contemplate both the welcome parcels from Amazon, the wonderfully apt holiday postcard from my bungalow neighbours, and the two-minute conversation extending over about 90 minutes that I so very much "enjoyed" having in my recent past over at the care-home. Dear Mama can barely articulate the fact that her memory and mental powers are "blasted", but she is at least at the moment blessedly calm3 about this undeniable fact in the face of constant reassurance that it's OK, and she has nothing to worry about, and no decisions to make. Etc bloody etc over and over again.

But all I'd say, I think, is appreciate each day to the full while you have any ability to do so. I shall be adding this to the growing list of discussion points I hope to be able to cover with that grand Bureaucrat in the sky at some point in my own future.

Ouch!

Courtesy of Steve Lamacq:

Bought a dog from the blacksmith.
Took him home.
Straight away he made a bolt for the door.

Well it made me smile.

After the winter of 1902, [Cantor] was in and out of the Nervenklinik, helplessly battling an infinity of madness.

Oren Harman, reviewing "Naming Infinity" in The New Republic


I know how he feels.

Ouch 2!

Same programme:

How do you get the attention of a gold prospector?
You shout "Heigh, You!"

"So you're having a bit of a day there, Mr President?"

As Mrs Landingham once put it. (And Christa used to think I was a master of understatement.) The black humour continues to pile up. I got a phone call from the matron of the care-home at about 17:30 to warn me, gently but firmly, that if dear Mama continues her present policy of randomly wandering about the halls and rooms of her no doubt confusing new home it won't be her new home for very much longer. Cue another little family confab.

The Interweb is too big!

Brian has just reminded me of a site I haven't been to for a very long time. Thanks! He tells me he's been scouring it for public domain audio of Sherlock Holmes dramatisations. (The BBC had a tendency to wipe stuff like that.) Meanwhile, I've been listening to 140 minutes from today's CD delivery (a wonderful double compilation of stuff from The Art of Noise) while straining to read the many pages of tiny print in the fascinating booklet. Am I alone in missing 12" vinyl artwork and sleeve notes, I wonder?

Books, etc

As for the other stuff here. I spotted both the Clive James and the Frances Woodsford in Waterstone's on my last trip down into Soton, but declined to pay High Street prices for them. The Lynne Truss came from Jonathan's "Arcade Books" after I'd posted dear Mama's house keys up to Leigh and a letter informing her bank of her change of address. (Postally, she's going to be contactable via me wherever we park her bod.) And the Blu-ray "Microcosmos" is that wonderful little French film I mentioned that Christa and I saw down at the Harbour Lights cinema back in 1997.

It's 22:43 but the eyelids are getting very droopy already...

  

Footnotes

1  Suite #2.
2  April may indeed be the cruellest month, but dementia has to be an exquisitely-close runner-up in the cruel disease stakes. Though (ironically) not necessarily so bad for the afflicted person.
3  Sadly, one of her neighbours last night was miserably calling for her "mummy". It wouldn't do me much good to call for mine at this point, would it? :-)