2010 — 12 September: Sunday
Well, so far, so good.1 There's a tinkling cascade of piano music, too. It's 08:38 and there's the small detail of pre-walk breakfast on the agenda. The hairs on my arms are now standing to attention: some of the music from the prelude of that Powell and Pressburger "Stairway to Heaven" film (that is, "A matter of life and death") has that effect. Followed up, yet again, by part of the "Academic Festival" overture, used in "People will talk". What is this, cheer up David with some of his favourite film music morning? Good ol' BBC Radio 3.
I love the idea that the UK can have constitutional changes in the absence of a written2 constitution. (The now late Lord Bingham's rôle in establishing a Supreme Court was described as just such a change.)
I'm less sure I love the way my mind works. I've just had a brief wobble on realising that "must have gala" is the sort of Spoonerism Christa would have loved, but she's no longer around to share it with, dammit! KBO
So I've just (pre-)ordered the Blu-ray of "Eclipse" after first dithering over the pending release of "Our friends in the North". (The Guardian's special offer price on the latter is a mere £5 higher than my usual supplier.)
Seren(lucky dip)ity
After a very pleasant walk, a shower, a light chicken lunch, some further cartons of ancient Christa paperwork, a cuppa or three, and an episode of "West Wing" I was just kicking back with a short dip into Chris Mullin's extremely enjoyable (though badly proof-read) new set of diaries, accompanied by Jarvis Cocker's fine music show on BBC 6Music, and look what I just found:
Laws, and sausages: nobody wants to see them being made. Here's quite a nice hatchet job on that lovely chap Mr Murdoch and his stinky "news" operation. Source and tiny snippet:
When Rupert Murdoch appeared on his own Fox News Channel last week and was, astonishingly, asked about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal — "the story that was really buzzing around the country and certainly here in New York", as the anchorman put it — Murdoch cut him off with the words: "I'm not talking about that issue at all today. I'm sorry."
MPs could do worse than summon Murdoch to the Commons, to answer questions about who sanctioned illegal practices by his journalists, but he'd probably reply as Hyman Roth did to Michael Corleone: "I didn't ask who gave the order because it had nothing to do with business."
Today's burst of Nature
Not a million miles away from a rather large (Ham)pshire software laboratory...
I won't trouble you with my rather blurred shot of a Boris jumping around on his web — I preferred Mike's piglets above.
I've been having fun...
... chucking out whole files full of stuff. For example, I first started insuring my life, and saving for my retirement, back in May 1974 with a little outfit called (at the time) Hambro Life Assurance Limited. They suggested (by a process I still do not begin to understand) they could magically transmute my regular £10 per month at age 23 into a "projected cash value" of £24350 at age 65. Pah! A decade later, they had themselves transmuted into a bigger outfit called Allied Dunbar and their oh-so-persuasive sales chappie had handed my file over to his son, who set about trying to persuade me that various stock markets around the globe were just waiting to make me seriously rich...
One of my chums put it neatly in a recent email. But it's 20:50 and I've decided it's now time for some more pixel magic.