2013 — 25 January: Friday
Well, the barometer reading has shot up this morning.1 I have a couple of minor missions of mercy — not to mention some effort needed to top-up Mother Hubbard's blasted cupboard — and am, yet again, wondering how I ever found time to go to work for the 38 years I put in at various coal-faces. Still, it taught me a useful phrase that I can now apply to my various revised photon-dispersal arrangements yesterday; I am "declaring victory and moving on". A phrase once in wide use within the serried ranks2 of IBM management.
In earlier years...
... I liked to describe 'molehole' as my otiose little web sanctuary. Today, I've finally seen the word "in the wild":
To philosophy [Ramsay] gave a first version of the 'redundancy' theory of truth, stating that to describe a statement as true is merely equivalent to asserting it, so that predicating 'is true' of an assertion is strictly otiose. So to say 'Europe is a continent is true,' is equivalent to simply saying 'Europe is a continent.' This in turn means that 'true' does not denote a substantive property of utterances. Although it sounds simple, redundancy theory went on to have a huge impact on formal logic and epistemology.
Philosophers are easily entertained, it seems. Still, University Bursars regard them with some affection as they're also considerably cheaper to run than physicists, or mathematicians. (Evidence.)
Seeking Freudian analysis in Vienna for unrequited love of a married woman strikes me as pleasingly outrégeous — sorry, couldn't resist. I might have known the review would turn out to be by one of my more readable philosophers too: Grayling. [Pause] "David is hungry is true". Time for breakfast.
Then lunch!
Already it's 13:49, and extremely chilly out there as I finish shovelling some more fuel into the seemingly rapacious maw. But at least the food cupboard is somewhat replenished and the first mercy mission is done and dusted. Brian now has temporary use of a dinky Pioneer A/V box while his rather more upmarket Denon is away getting a thorough going-over to try to identify and then fix its most idiosyncratic audio behaviour with his Humax Freesat boxes.
Meanwhile, news arrives from the care-home thanking me for my continued 'confidence' in their enterprise and telling me of their annual fee increase bringing tears to the already-watering eyes, not to mention somewhat nearer dear Mama's eventual, inevitable, impoverishment. And I have a trio of DVDs to watch, one courtesy of Brian. Details will have to wait while I set off on mercy mission #2, to re-unite Roger with his repaired Volvo somewhere in Winchester.
I can only hope...
... that I can one day be as wise and accepting of my fate and my life as Wilko Johnson has just proved himself to be in a 15-minute interview on BBC Radio 4. Can't recommend it highly enough!
In infinitely more...
... trivial news, I've just had time3 to scan the trio of incoming DVDs:
"Up at the Villa" is another Philip Haas film that Christa and I watched in the Harbour lights cinema when it came out in 2000 or so. It's based on a Somerset Maugham novella. "Now is good" is the new film by Ol Parker, who made the wonderful "Imagine Me and You". I don't know the third title, but Brian pressed this spare copy on me. It looks both horrible and interesting.
[Pause]
I am (very) rarely affected emotionally in the way that I have just been by "Now is good". It is — in my opinion — a largely true-to-life (and true-to-death) roller coaster ride that confirms my already high opinion of young Mr Parker.