2012 — 11 December: Tuesday
I'm currently not very curious to find out what Microsoft's merry elves are bringing me for their last set of scheduled patches on this -2C frosty morning.1 I have a cuppa that's commanding my attention. Plus breakfast and a packed lunch to prep. I hope that stale crust I've been hoarding is still where I left it.
Somehow I doubt...
... that removing $1.9 billion from one of my banks as a punishment for its thriving Mexican drug money and rogue nation laundering businesses (inventively well-concealed, no doubt, within its annual reports) is going to encourage them to pay me more interest on my under-nourished current account. They already pay me nothing, after all.
Still, this was the outfit — in 1981 when it was young and innocent (like me) and still lacking its current global ambitions (like me) and was merely the good ol' "Midland" — from whom we got a bridging loan2 to handle payments on the new house's mortgage while still 'owning' the previous house and paying the mortgage on that, too. So I bizarrely retain a residual affection for them.
Somehow I doubt...
... that the inventors of this Interweb malarkey foresaw its usefulness in facilitating the terrorism and paedophilia with which we're apparently plagued (if, that is, one believes the "news") either. It's an unfunny old world. Now, where did I put my all my weapons of mass destruction? In the newer shed...
Before I had time to tell you about the fishy behaviour wherein they stay, as it were, below periscope depth they seem to have recovered from whatever (hail? heron?) had traumatised them and are once more to
be seen having fin. Judging by the numbers of tiddlers, they've actually been having a lot of fin, which reminds me of WC Field's oft-expressed reason for refusing water in his alcohol.
Perhaps it was the shock of having a new little shed erected a few yards away and the bangs as Christa stapled loads of foam and silver foil insulation to its rather thin inner wall?
... under the bags of cocaine, I expect. There is, after all, a simple lock (fitted upside down — don't ask) to secure it.
Somehow I doubt...
... that early accountants, scratching their records on scraps of papyrus, foresaw the inexorable rise of their sometimes stinky trade. Money may talk, but it also walks... [Pause] As shall I. TTFN.
A little jaunt...
... of 5.6 sunny miles or so starting from the Old Alresford village hall, with lunch snacked while watching the ducks and swans on a very full river and back at Technology Towers — with my porch thermometer bang on zero — I need hardly any persuading to convince myself that I don't really need any further supplies for a bit. The roads are still frosted hereabouts so the car is now back in its garage until the evening outing. And I fully expect to have stopped shivering by then.
As time ticks by, I've been watching the thermometer on the way back down — it's already -1C — and contemplating the unpleasant frost showing not the slightest inclination to clear from the local bit of hilly road. I've just reluctantly decided to cancel my little evening expotition back over to Winchester. I wasn't very keen on the wheel spin when I set gently off up the hill this morning even though the motorway was fine when I got on to it. Horrid weather.
Enough is...
... quite definitely enough. It's -3C outside, looks as if it's getting foggy, the central heating is purring away doing its pleasant background heaty thing (I refuse to turn it up), but I've given in and actually shut the little window in the living room behind the blinds, thus ruining the architectural splendour of much labour by several generations of Boris, I suspect. In the 30 minutes since I did so, the temperature in here has shot up by a comforting 1C — fine by me.
It's now over fifty years since I read Jules Verne's book "20,000 leagues under the sea" (and was confused until I grasped the fact that the title didn't refer to the depth of the sea!). I recall the conversation and calculations by Captain Nemo about the carbon dioxide scrubber, and how long they could stay submerged without a fresh infusion of oxygen from the surface. (Shades, I suppose, of Tom Godwin's 1954 classic SF short story "The Cold Equations" that deals with the inevitable and tragic consequences of a stowaway on a space flight with finite oxygen supplies.) Still, I figure one chap living on his own in a two-storey 4-bed detached house in which I keep all the internal doors open is probably not going to run out of oxygen...