2011 — 26 June: Sunday
Not the brightest of starts1 so far. There's a walk "on the cards" though we've not finalised our plans yet. It occurs to me that dear Mama will be needing her next chocolate infusion quite soon, though the Terry's chocolate orange that Michelle provided last week should last another couple of days.
Meanwhile, before I grab some breakfast, here's my very own "Spot the ball" competition with my favourite footballer:
Some of the comments...
... attached to this article (on funding care proposals for the elderly) are a great deal more entertaining, and insightful, than any of the tired old guvmint proposals. Do people really still think that "National Insurance" contributions have been tucked away into a jar with their name on it? My vote is still for coin-operated suicide pill machines on every street corner. I'm sure many of our great financial institutions would be only too happy to sponsor such a scheme.
There was a neat cartoon in the New Yorker about six months ago. It showed an upper management dog seated comfortably at a fancy desk and saying to an unseated underling dog that "when the time comes the company will put you to sleep at its own expense".
There's many a true word spoken in jest... etc etc
Right. Nearly time I wasn't here if I'm to get there in time.
What a difference
When I set out for our agreed rendezvous it was grey and completely cloud-covered. It was also a mild temperature, perfect for walking. Now, the sky is cloudless and the car was like an oven when I got back into it for the return journey. 'appen there's no pleasin' sum folk.
I've also had to forsake both BBC 6Music (wall-to-wall Glastonbury jabber) and Radio 3 (wall-to-wall light music all too reminiscent of the dreadful stuff that used to fill the "Light" programme in the 1950s and early 1960s). So, a nice bit of Bach from CD to accompany my delicious chicken salad. Lunch is a bit late (it's 14:03) but, so what?
I'm not going to analyse the insight here, but the wording of the delivery made me smile. Source and snippet:
Yes, people who work in the private sector must look at public sector workers in disbelief. How did you end up there, they must think. What personality cocktail of laziness, self-loathing and intractable mediocrity would have led you to try to make your fortune (your incredibly modest fortune, albeit with overgenerous pension provision made possible only by tying the hands of enterprise) in that gloomy bureaucratic Mariana trench, far from the nourishing rays of the profit motive? How did the sorting hat of fate come to put you in life's Hufflepuff (but with a touch of Slytherin thrown in when it comes to local government contracts)?
Which reminds me: one of last night's unskippable trailers to the first part of the final Harry Potter ("Harry on camping" as Mark Kermode called it) looked quite promising.
I've been thinking...
... now that I've turned Christa's study into a habitable space, with a comfy armchair and excellent reading light, why not also reinstate an audio system up there? After all, it's not as if I lack the components with which to do so. All I need is the Denon CD/tuner/amp and a Freeview box to use as a digital radio. I can use the Rock Solids as my speakers. And all this stuff is just gathering dust down here in the living room. It would therefore be much simpler than the system I had in my own study before that transmogrified into a books warehouse a year ago.
Of course, I still have to contend with the storage cartons that I temporarily stashed into Peter's room last week while I was putting up the latest set of book shelving. But it's really about time I dealt with those. Who knows? I may even tackle the contents of her three wardrobes. And I also really should set up a "proper" household paperwork system — the shock of seeing my present "system" would kill Christa if she could see it :-)