2011 — 14 May: Saturday

I came relatively late to an appreciation of "Pet Sounds", buying it only when it first emerged on CD. Brian Matthew has just played a track from it, followed by "A day in the life". The latter was initially banned by the BBC (of course). Good stuff.

A nice, sunny morning. As was this one, back in the Old Windsor days:

Time, I think, for a second cuppa and some breakfast. While contemplating one of the oddest¹ search strings yet to bring a web browser to my little sanctuary:

nora catches a train from coventry to london euston at 15.45. the journey takes 2 hours 10 minutes. nora must then catch a london underground train which leaves at 40 minutes past the hour and takes approximately 23 minutes to reach her destination at swiss cottage. at what time does nora arrive at swiss cottage? [3]

When is a palm not a palm?

When it's an Encephalartos woodii, of course.

I have just...

... permitted myself a single lump of chocolate as a minor celebration, even though I've not yet had any lunch. Mr Postie's delivered a credit card bill of £0-00 requesting a minimum payment of that amount. There's also notification from what I still think of as Christa's bank that "As you have not fully utilised your existing overdraft facility within the last 12 months, you will notice² that we are proposing to reduce the limit of the new overdraft facility to a more appropriate level for your needs." Their policy so far has been to halve the limit annually, so I guess it will still take a while to reduce to the zero that would adequately meet my "needs".

And, following yesterday evening's discovery of a well-concealed facility buried inside BlackBeast's WinAmp player, I've also just finished adding a current list of my MP3s and their running times here. There's some degree of cleanup³ needed, but Life is a bit too short to bother.

Lunch, Mrs Landingham? Yes, why not. It is, after all, 13:52 already. [Pause] That's better. Now, just tell me how Ry Cooder's "Chicken Skin Music" album can possibly be 35 years old? The track "Stand by me" is playing as I type. This Time lark will be the death of us :-)

Anosognosia

I had to smile when, during my latest foray into one of my current⁴ tomes, I found footnote #460 attached to the following sentence:

The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight.

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and his Emissary

He's also demonstrated what a complete amateur I am when it comes to footnotes! But that's by the way.

Later that day

A walk is now pencilled in for tomorrow, and it's time (18:57) to do something about my evening meal. I will, after all, be needing the energy to tackle at least some of the errors clearly visible in my MP3 meta-data tags. Not to mention the realisation that some of my MP3s — shock, horror — mysteriously failed to get themselves added to the WinAmp Media Library in the first place. You just can't rely on the people who operate these computer thingies these days, can you? <Sigh>

Good job I'm not obsessive about any of this sort of thing.

Footnotes

¹  It must surely have taken longer to type out than to solve. I assume it was re-typed given the lack of capital letters :-)
²  They must be joking.
³  'Twas ever thus with computer data files.
⁴  People who read only one book at a time are as odd (in my opinion) as people who eat only one item of food at a time from a mixed plate. Christa did, and Peter does, exactly that.