2012 — 28 January: Saturday

There are times1 when only a splendid bit of Bach will do. Though I do wonder how he managed to get all the notes in the right order. The first cuppa is half gone. The jim-jams have yet to be displaced by the winter woolies. Even the 07:30 news is still a few minutes away.

Still, the weekend is getting started. Last night's video-on-a-USB-stick entertainment, by the way, eventually (thanks, Mike) turned out to be the recent "special" wherein Graham Norton's guest was Madonna.2 I have a sneaking admiration for that lady (both as an actress and musician) though I could have done without all the hysterical whooping of the studio audience. And I shall certainly in due course try to catch up with the Wallis and Edward film she's just spent some three years making. That's a fascinating tale of shenanigans in the higher echelons of our deliciously tangled social "superiors".

Technically, is this...

... a "proper" haiku?

42nd Street

I was putting the...

... finishing touches to my latest culinary crockpot masterpiece (I hope!) — from which I now see I once again decided to omit the tomatoes — when Brian drove on to my drive, unfashionably early, for our trip down to Portswood to find the Peter Rhodes bookshop. I was only able to persuade my literary companion to buy one extra book (for a daughter for next Xmas) but I was very pleased with this oddball selection for a tenner, including a DVD. And Big Bro would have lingered in a flight of fancy a lot longer than me over the two floor-to-ceiling shelves of aviation-related material.

Books x4

The Alan Bennett is a useful spare for a gift. The book of (Robert) Crumb postcards replaces one that I dis-assembled to make into a collage for the books warehouse many years ago. The Rossellini birthday tribute just looked fascinating, and who needs an excuse to read about mad science?

However, this last title was worth it just for the front cover artwork:

Books x1

As it's now 13:35 and distinctly chilly I declare it time for some lunch. [Pause] On balance, I'm declaring the crockpot a success. The croissant, however, was a little stale — even by my standards. It's 18:29 and the rest of the evening starts here or, at least, it will after I've done the dishes...

  

Footnotes

1  This is one of them.
2  Amusing to learn that the Hungarian translation of the title of her book "Sex" was "Slut" though I'm not quite sure who that says more about. I bought my copy over in Florida so at some point it would have gone through an X-ray scanner. It has a doubtless radio-opaque metal cover with the title stencilled on, and at one point made a superb end-of-shelf book-stop for some of my more unruly volumes.