2012 — 10 January: Tuesday

Following our delicious roast chicken, I'd suggested as our main viewing yesterday evening "The Prestige"1 which I last saw nearly four years ago, a mere 10 months after I'd bought it. Mike agreed, and preceded it with enough of "Making War Horse" (the National Theatre stage show, not the new Spielberg movie) to whet my appetite. Looks very interesting.

Chaps still need sleep, however, so I toddled back on a drizzly but largely empty motorway, cunningly remembering (just in time) to leave by the earlier exit just in case the next one is still closed overnight at the moment. A quick final cuppa, therefore, and g'night.

Should know better...

... than to react to the noise of the garden waste collection truck, but I suppose it was about time to get up in any case. One grapefruit later, I'm left with a sour taste in my mouth (though that could have been the fatuous "classical charts" chatter on BBC Radio 3). It's actually quite bright out there. Though the behaviour of the drizzle on my windscreen made it fairly (un)clear last night that it's time for new wiper blades. I presume four years is pretty good going.

If I didn't...

... already have a Tablet PC, one of these might well have tempted me. Those multi-core ARM processors are turning up all over the place.

I've long admired...

... beautiful typesetting. And spent probably more money than I should have on Folio Society editions, not to mention the occasional RISC PC system. When I first drafted my notes for Christa's funeral I knew I would be "hanging them" around several quatrains from the Rubaiyat. Here's one that (only) just failed to make my final selection:

Quatrain #51

How anyone in their right mind could prefer the "more accurate" translation served up in 1967 by Robert Graves and Omar Ali-Shah...

What we shall be is written, and we are so.
Heedless of Good or Evil, pen, write on!
By the first day all futures were decided;
Which gives our griefs and pains irrelevancy.

... defeats me.

Time for lunch. It's 13:05 already, and I'm starving.

Having just returned from...

... yet another trip over to the care-home, it's just occurred to me that the dear ol' girl might well agree to pay for some of my petrol costs. Never having had a company car, I have quite literally no idea what the "going rate" is for such mileage, but I'm (fairly) sure she wouldn't begrudge me the odd tankful. It's a 22-mile round trip if today's odometer reading can be trusted.

It's 15:36, Mrs Landingham. How about a nice, hot cuppa before all the daylight's gone?

It's slowly dawning on me...

... that the Law of Conservation of Matter — as applied to books in this house — simply doesn't hold sway. At some point after 1995 I bought both a hardback and a paperback of Chris Priest's "The Prestige". I suspect I gave one away to Roger. I cannot find the other. Though I did find a copy of his "The Separation". This annoys me. I shall make another cuppa instead. It's only 21:40 but the eyelids are strangely heavy.

Book

Funny, is it not, how the thing you find is invariably in the last place you look, even when that's the place you might reasonably expect to find it?

  

Footnote

1  An earlier film by the director of "Inception".