2010 — 28 November: Sunday

Surprisingly,1 there's no ice on the car windscreen, so I guess it must also be dry. It's 09:05 and the sun is up there somewhere behind a few clumps of low, thick cloud. My start-me-up cuppa is on the starting blocks, Jo Good is on the radio, and half a delicious grapefruit has just become one with me (as it were).

As I scan (masochistically, wearily and warily) through my first "books of the year" list and find myself preferring the often caustic associated comments, I remember why I also prefer the ever-reliable Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Gaiman, and a whole host of other lovely stuff, almost all of it from the "niche" or "genre" categories both despised and ignored by the literati. Few if any of my own choices2 ever seem to get anywhere near such a list. Neophilia is all very well, but...

Breakfast, I think, Mrs Landingham. And more tea. I need more tea. I fancy a taste of summer. I also concede the faint possibility that my algorithm for working my way systematically through the contents of the rarely-accessed freezer compartment of the main fridge still needs a spot of work...

Ancient fruit

I now have 24 hours to work through the (delicious) melted stuff. That's tonight's ice-cream accompaniment sorted, therefore. It "Grieves" me to report that Tom of that singular surname has nothing better to do of a fine, Sunday morning than point out my typos. Thank you, Thomas :-)

Lunch?

Well, it is 12:35 though I'm not yet hungry. It's crept up to -2C outside. I await Peter's arrival though I'm unsure of his plans when he gets here. Meanwhile, I've updated my A/V system diagram and I've also been reading all about Oppo's next-generation Blu-ray player with its new video-scaling technology. All this on the Win7 BlackBeast, by the way. The only application left behind on the Gateway PC is my email client. Mind you there's a few hundred gigabytes of data to be sorted out and transferred tidily, from that and my other XP PC. Chaps need hobbies! Even pointless ones — indeed, especially pointless ones. What would be the point of having a hobby with a point?

Time for lemonses, I conclude.

Bootiful?

Almost made me smile:

Still, perhaps we should all be grateful for [Bernard] Matthews's Turkey Twizzler. Resembling what might come out should Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout attempt to do a poo, and much scorned by Jamie Oliver, the Twizzler was so full of additives the whisper among parents was that one bite could turn your children into werewolves.

As a vegetarian, I was spared the Twizzler's culinary nuances, though I was reliably informed that it tasted like "the floor of hell". The Twizzler became a universal emblem of the random rubbish that goes into processed meat products which, in turn, helped wake the nation up to intensive farming practices generally.

Barbara Ellen in The Observer


Checklist

Lunch? Yes
House warm and tidy? Yes
Desktop sorted? Yes
Son arrived? No
Music loud? Yes

Mid-afternoon

As I'm once again embroiled in the machinations of the Roman Empire under Augustus I'm dragged briefly back to the 21st Century to learn that Peter is "just setting off".

I have been visited...

... and royally treated to a delicious meal down in Soton, refilled the little case Peter uses to hold all the DVDs he borrows from me from time to time, had handed over a sumptuous early Xmas present (that "40 — a Doonesbury retrospective" book) and watched as the Shazam application he quickly downloaded on to his Google Phone listened to an old minidisc recording from 1983 or thereabouts of an Alexis Korner-hosted examination of the guitar genius of Ry Cooder and promptly identified the opening music as being from the instrumental section in the middle of "If walls could talk" from the Paradise and Lunch album. It was — I've just checked by firing up iTunes on the iMac and playing the track for myself. Jolly clever to pick it out from "inside" the track, as it were.

As a direct consequence I'm now listening to an adjacent mp3 album in my collection: Panthalassa — Bill Laswell's interesting remix project stirring up the awesome music of Miles Davis. Magic.

I don't think it ever got above freezing today. Certainly, it's now (20:13) -3C and feels as if it could sink further yet. Brrr. [Pause] Right, all gaps in the DVD cases filled with tags reminding me what Peter has just taken with him. Next task: fold the accumulated pile of DVD and Blu-ray artwork into the folders that live under my giant iPod while I boil the kettle for my next cuppa. One day, sooner or later, I shall be organised — then what will I do? It's 21:20 but I can feel the need for sleep building up. I was reading until after 02:00 this morning.

I wonder how long I shall be able to resist cracking open the delicious Doonesbury? It weighs a stonking 4.9kg and looks mouth-watering. [Pause] Well, it's 22:52 and I'm just re-surfacing after deep immersion in 40 years of Trudeau's creation. Amazing. Time for my suppa cuppa.

  

Footnotes

1  Given that it's -4C outside at the moment.
2  Honorable exceptions this year are Philip Larkin's "Letters to Monica" (two mentions), John Lanchester's "Whoops!" (UK title), and yesterday's arrival from Alasdair Gray.