2010 — 2 December: Thursday
I give in, Christa. Where do you keep the snow plough?1 It's 07:26 or s(n)o(w) and dark outside. Yawn. The cuppa is helpful, but I shall have to dig out my walking boots when I totter and slip along to the optician for my 09:00 appointment. Grrr. Mike sent over a couple of photos of the snow in Winchester in the wee small hours. I suspect we're not going walkabout today.
Time for breakfast...
Not quite sure why this isn't behind a paywall, but it's arrived at via the "Arts & Letters" site, which may have cut a deal with that nice Mr Murdoch...
Why has Wells failed so dramatically? Because, says Mencken, he has fallen victim to the "messianic delusion": "What has slowly crippled him and perhaps disposed of him is his gradual acceptance of the theory, corrupting to the artist and scarcely less so to the man, that he is one of the Great Thinkers of his era, charged with a pregnant Message to the Younger Generation — that his ideas, rammed into enough skulls, will Save the Empire, not only from the satanic Nietzscheism of the Hindenburgs and post-Hindenburgs, but also from all those inner Weaknesses that taint and flabbergast its vitals, as the tapeworm with nineteen heads devoured Atharippus of Macedon". (So far as I can determine, Mencken made up the unfortunate Atharippus.)
As I remarked in...
... earlier times, it's always been a joy to meet intelligent, articulate, caring and careful professionals and transact/interact with them. My optician and I go back a long way together; today's lesson was not merely that almost all my powers of ocular accommodation have gone, but that I've suffered a "posterior vitreous detachment" (PVD) in my right eye. Great! I'd been aware since the end of September of a diffuse floater languidly tracking my eye movements and more than half expected him to confirm the beginnings of a cataract. Not so. PVDs can even clear up by themselves, and are more of an irritation, it seems. The brain can even learn to filter them out. And although they can drain the vitreous humour he doesn't advocate that as it more or less guarantees a cataract within a year.
I've also decided to give up on my (nearly four-year) attempt to get used to my varifocal lenses and will now simply use three pairs of different strength single-vision glasses: one for distance vision (for driving), an intermediate one (for use at the PC screen), and (possibly) one just for reading books. It brings to mind a book of fairy tales I had as a kid. The front cover showed an elderly wizard wearing four pairs.
It's 10:20 and the snow lies deep and crisp and what-have-you. Time for an early lemonses, Mrs Landingham?
I have a chilled nectarine gently warming on the radiator behind me. Does it get any better than this? (Mike's just told me the BBC says it's going to be -9C early tomorrow morning. Won't that be grand?) And a neighbour is busy trying to rev his car to the point where it can climb our little local hill — some people never learn. Right. On with the show. It's 11:58.
Ten minutes...
... gentle work with one of Christa's telescopic-handled sponge floor mops showed me that there really was still a car on my drive. Then, as I revealed to that faraway sister-in-law of mine, I found yet another powerful reason for me to miss her. She was ace at helping me get my Wellington boots off after I'd been out clearing snow :-)
Time for a spot of lunch to accompany the pianist Nicholas Angelich and his Chopin. My Dad enjoyed playing this sort of material. I enjoyed hearing it, and still do.
Ipso facto
Or "by the fact itself". Almost the name of a place to search for your MP's latest expense claims. Modern fiction, heh? Nothing to beat it.
You know you're getting older when, after a lunch and a period of intense concentration on a couple of large text files that you're editing, you think "I'll just close my eyes for a five-minute break" sitting comfortably on the sofa with nice music playing and — you guessed it — an hour whizzes by at the speed of Time. I'm left wondering if there's an official definition of a "mumblecore movie" as BBC 6Music was having its "Film Thursday" and I'm almost sure that's a phrase I heard during it. [Pause, to ask Mrs Google] Crikey, there (sort of) is. And the director (Lynn Shelton) is also tackling the novel I mentioned here. The long arm of coincidence, heh?
It's 16:09 and time for a fresh brew of the cup that cheers (and warms).
It strikes me...
... as I scan my way gently through the artwork from many a favourite CD (reminding myself, on the way, of much interesting stuff contained within long-unread ...
... sleeve notes) while listening to PlanetRock and supping the occasional cuppa in a nice, warm living room that there are many worse ways to be spending an evening that is already -4C outside with thick snow no doubt freezing hard on the road outside. It's 20:45 and I actually watched nearly 20 minutes of TV news 'n' stuff earlier on. The upscaled 1080i ITV1 picture that they proudly proclaim as hi-def on the Freesat HD channel is very unimpressive. A complete waste of bandwidth, if you ask me.
The Blake, by the way, was buried inside Rupert Hine's excellent 1988 "Thinkman" album Life is a full time occupation.
It's 23:14 and has been a long day. G'night.