2011 — 4 January: Tuesday

My little housing estate1 is once again nearly deserted after the departure of all the worker bees and wage slaves this morning. Meanwhile, instead of doing something sensible (like, say, getting breakfast) I've been browsing "Butterflies and Wheels" following another excellent set of blood-pressure-raising links from Ophelia Benson.

Enough (for now). There's supplies to be supplied and the partial eclipse is over. Time to get busy. By the way, given that we all knew VAT was being raised today many months ago, how come only now are people pointing out it's at its "highest-ever" level and that it's "hitting the poor" disproportionately hard?

Asleep at the wheel?

Step 1 done

Very few shoppers in Waitrose but I noticed that my vital food group has yet to go up in price...

Biscuits

It's now 10:39 and I think I've earned some breakfast. It feels jolly cold out there, though my porch thermo insists it's just above freezing.

Not only is my...

... collection of Joseph Heller's writing not quite as comprehensive2 as I thought, I had somehow managed to overlook his work on the screenplay of "Sex and the Single Girl". Tut, tut. (Source.)

Catch as catch can                   	Various collected writings                  	2003	 £10.99	2003/07/12
Catch-22                             	Desert Island book choice                   	1961	  £3.95	1979/05/09
Catch-22 (in German)                 	Bought for Christa; Mutti read it first     	1971	  £1.00	1974/--/--
Closing time                         	Catch 22 revisited; stalled, surprisingly   	1994	 £14.99	1994/10/08
God knows                            	God owes David an apology, it seems         	1984	  £8.95	1984/11/23
Good as Gold                         	Excellent, anti-Kissinger polemic           	1979	  £4.95	1979/04/17
Now and Then, a memoir               	From Coney Island to Here...                	1998	 £16.99	1998/03/28
Picture this                         	Life, a usurer's manual?                    	1988	 £12.95	1988/10/21
Portrait of an artist, as an old man 	Literally: how to top Catch-22?             	2000	 £12.99	2000/07/08
Something happened                   	But not much in this book                   	1974	  £0.95	1976/09/04
We bombed in New Haven               	As did this play based on parts of Catch-22 	1967	  £0.25	1971/08/02
No laughing matter                   	Heller's unfunny bout with Guillain-Barré   	1986	 £10.95	1986/09/05

The copy of "Catch-22" listed here is the hardback I eventually treated myself to. I have two battered paperback copies (one of which always travels in my overnight bag) and a third copy that literally fell apart. Come to think of it, I also have an lp of Heller reading extracts, and (most recently) a little boxed CD set I bought on one of my solo trips to Bournemouth.

But, Miriam, isn't...

... that the whole point? :-)

Ballet

Celebrity science?

This is, as usual, a cracking source of good fun. (There's a PDF file of it here.)

Right! It's time (14:17) to hit the care-home trail, bearing a pack of detoxifying choccies. Otherwise I risk missing the free cuppa.

Tea, Mrs Landingham!

I need it for my shattered nerves. The first set were shredded by the conversational roundabout to nowhere that was a couple of hours with dear Mama spent trying to get her to understand that she needn't worry about "not having anything (food, etc) in the house" because that's not how it works. The next batch became frayed while trying to get her to understand that she doesn't have to pay anyone there anything for anything as I'm doing that via the Lasting Power of Attorney she requested, but now has absolutely no memory of or clue about.

I swung by Mike on my way home so I could pick up my DVD set of "Inception", see just how awful it did indeed look on his projection system, and to collect the Blu-ray set that he'd ordered for me (which looks superb, by the way). Nerves were somewhat settled by my hour there, but the godawful chaos that is rush-hour traffic at the M3 exit into Leigh Road (let alone rush-hour traffic on the M3 from Winchester heading south) soon had them jangling all over again, particularly when I sat through two complete light change sequences before the morons streaming out of Eastleigh actually left a gap big enough for me to squeak into. Not a good time to be on the road there — I'd forgotten, though considering my three trips a day to see Christa in the hospice3 in November 2007, I really should have remembered.

It's 18:26 and the night is young!

Well, that's another replacement DVD...

... that Warner Bros now owes me. The DVD included in the "Inception" Blu-ray set is just as badly-mastered as the one in the "normal" 2-disc set. But the quality of the film, and of the Blu-ray, is magnificent, even if the amount of high-volume low-frequency stuff on its DTS-HD Master audio channels had me reaching, several times, for the volume control lest I do permanent damage to my speakers. That said, the PMC units handle low frequencies with far more confidence than the Castle units ever did. I'm still not convinced I need a subwoofer.

At 22:18 it must be time for my next cuppa, surely?

  

Footnotes

1  I tend to think of it as "mine" as I've now lived here longer than anyone else :-)
2  At least I have the "lost" chapter from "Catch-22". I didn't buy Playboy just for the pretty pictures :-)
3  I have a nasty suspicion if I dug deeply enough into my only partly-sane state of mind back then, I might find I didn't care whether or not I got killed. It probably didn't do much for the nerves of my sequence of brave and patient co-pilots.