2012 — 30 August: Thursday
Not entirely surprisingly, Mr Bellos turned out to be a less gripping read than Mr Brown, though both eventually had to give way to the increasingly strident demands from my eyelids for further sleep last night. Before midnight, too, which is quite unusual these days. I'd also have to say that, while the two Gillian Welch CDs were OK, neither blew my socks off (as it were).
Now (08:04) it's another unpromisingly grey start this morning1 — and the heating even kicked in at some point judging by the above-ambient temperature of the radiator in my bathroom. (I left the thermostat in the hall set to 20C overnight but have knocked it down a notch. Always cheaper just to don another layer.) Not much of a summer, is it?
Mike emailed me with his critique of the Emerson Lake and Palmer re-mastered CDs. The lad managed to trip the thermal overload protection on his Quad 606 power amp at one point. I shall be checking his ears for signs of blood when I meet up with him tomorrow evening :-)
Breakfast devoured...
... so time for the day's mischief to begin.
I've only ever written...
... one book review in my life (though I wrote plenty of record and hi-fi kit reviews in an earlier incarnation). I did it for Professor David EH Jones who is, I freely admit, one of the good guys — he wrote the always-entertaining tales of Daedalus and DREADCO for some four decades. And I did it after buying my own copy of his latest book even though he'd also sent me a copy with a charming note enclosed.
I had no idea you could buy book reviews by, as it were, the truck load. My naïvety astounds me still:
In seeking some attention for [her book], she checked out Kirkus, a reviewing service founded in 1933 that has branched out into self-published books. Kirkus would review 'Sex' for $425, a
price that made her balk.
Another issue with Kirkus was that it did not guarantee its review would be positive. Ms. Lorenzana felt she would then be in the position of having spent a bundle just so someone she did not
know could insult, belittle or devalue her work. On the Internet, you can usually get someone to do that free.
You don't say?
Out and about
I quite fancied a little mooch around Eastleigh to see how far further downhill it has slid. (Quite a long way, I fear.) I also felt like having a pint-sized toddle in the car.
Since
— my trick memory allowed me to forget to take my 'loyalty' card with me yesterday when I was in Soton,
— the same outfit has a branch in Eastleigh,
— my so-called 'savings' card with them has a still-unspent £10 on it,
— I'm reluctant to leave a bookshop empty-handed,
— I couldn't bring myself even to look at any of the host2 of opportunistic clones/variants of "Fifty Shades"
I ended up with something by the 'undercover economist' chap:
While I was swanning around in the Swan Centre, Mr Postie managed to shovel this through my letter box, and (more vitally) I managed to avoid treading on it when I let myself back in, staggering under the weight of my one paperback:
Now that I've played it, I find it's already in some danger of displacing "Out of Sight" as my favourite film soundtrack. Time for lunch, methinks. I'm hungry. Again.
You know you're...
... getting older when a chum emails you a link to this sort of stuff. I note, also, that this 'concessionary' transport now only applies to England, thus putting paid to any thoughts of traversing Scotland or Wales on the cheap. How many civil servants, up and down England, have had to produce such a mind-numbing document, I wonder? Let alone translate it:
I still have Christa's bus pass (which she was genuinely delighted by and last used, to my knowledge, exactly one year before she died!). The photo on it looks as if it was taken using a fish-eye lens, and the thing expired just a couple of months after she did, poor woman. Recall Shazia Mirza's wry joke? Someone asked her, "What do you think of the burka? Is it too restrictive?" She replied, "All my cousins in France wear the burka, which is great, because they all use the same bus pass."
Later that day
Let's see. There was tea and a biccie with Roger and Eileen. A brief thunderstorm. My evening meal. A spot of OCRing.3 And now, having just had a call from Junior — a pleasant change after a series of cold calls from the Indian subcontinent — I gather they may yet visit briefly on Saturday to raid my gardening toolshed. The cheek of youth.
I've just risked the cost of two pints of beer on a used copy of "Ingathering: The Complete People Stories of Zenna Henderson" (from Atlanta, Georgia of all places) to put the lid, once and for all, on this particular bit of collecting. Watch this space.