2010 — 12 October: Tuesday
My lovely quiet new heating system is doing a grand job maintaining (currently) a 13C difference between my living room and the great outdoors, into which I briefly ventured to wipe the condensation off the car windows. It's 08:24 and I've already forgotten my first cuppa, but not the delicious grapefruit.1
What, I idly wonder, did the BBC's deputy DG do for his salary of close to £500,000, his pay-off of close to £1,000,000 and pension worth several million? Particularly as his position will not be filled. (Sauce, when you consider how many programmes his pay could have financed.)
Edwardians on the moon
About the only reason HG Wells' novel "First men in the moon" remains in my memory is that Cavorite was manufactured2 on my birthday.
Gatiss was, he says, keen to have an "art nouveau" spaceship: "I wanted it to look like the entrance to a Paris metro station." Sadly, he had to drop the novel's lunar crops on budgetary grounds. Wells envisaged fast-growing vegetation in which Cavor and Bedford lose their way before finding sustenance with magic moon mushrooms. It's one of the novel's funniest scenes: the men gibber through a jungle — lost in space and out of their Edwardian gourds.
As I scan gently...
... on into the afternoon, through my seemingly endless CD artwork collection, I pause briefly at the sixth (and, for 20 years since 1975, the last) album from Pete Atkin, lyrics by Clive James — Live Libel:
As you'll see if you click the pic, the original sleeve notes are now on a small section of Pete's excellent web site. There wasn't room for them on the re-issued CD artwork, as the January 2009 annotations took up all the space.
Before the clouds...
... encroached too far, I whizzed down to the End of the Hedge for my (approximately) monthly mooch around their shelves of light recorded entertainment. A highly successful trip, on this occasion. And I caught Mr Postie (a new and somewhat surly-seeming mute, this time) so I have some goodies to run the scanner across, as it were. But first, I shall blag a free cuppa with Roger & Eileen and commiserate with them on the death, last week, of their next door neighbour — our mutual ex-colleague Pete. Those leaves do still keep on falling, don't they?
Just magnificent. But now time for an evening meal. It's 17:54 and seems to be getting rather chilly out there.
Having patched...
... both my XP systems, here's today's little grab-bag of goodies. After all, it is nearly a chap's birthday:
Soon be midnight, but I'm off to bed. G'night.