2013 — 29 May: Wednesday

Oh good grief. Only 10% of the 50,000,000 or so PPI policies sold in the UK have so far actually been complained about according to the CEO of the Financial Ombuds(wo)man Service. She implies that for the banks to be trying to declare the whole sorry saga to be over with (and thus [my opinion alert] needing no further funds set aside for compensation rather than exec bonuses?) is more than a bit premature. And earlier a chap had the temerity to reply that not only did justice in Afghanistan depend on the depth of your wallet but that the same might even be true in the UK.

I really1 must stop listening to the news before I've even enjoyed my morning cuppa.

Until yesterday...

... I'd paid only little heed to Austen's letters as I assumed the undeniable fact that her sister Cassandra had burned the majority of their voluminous correspondence would mean disappointment at least as acute as that I felt when I first learned Saki, too, had suffered the same fate at the hands of his family. So I had only the subset contained in the "Selected Letters" that Vivien Jones put out in 2004, and I admit I'd only skimmed it briefly eight years ago at a time when Christa's health was once again giving us much distracting cause for concern.

But that was yesterday, and thus before my rewarding visit to Waterstone's ...

Book

... and I'm now left wondering where to draw the line between focussed enthusiasm and scholarship. There have been no new letters discovered since the 3rd edition in 1995 (so the tally remains at 161) but I gather there are now many further notes (300 pages of the 666 or so total). As my companion in book-shopping crime remarked, "That will keep you quiet for a bit." It certainly looks like a fitting companion to Shapard's "Annotated" P&P that is currently now on loan to Eileen.

I suppose I should have checked first to see if a Kindle edition was available. It would have been lighter, and probably rather cheaper. It's a habit I shall (must!) try to cultivate. Though there is still something about a book that a Kindle just cannot emulate.

As I happily...

... snaffled a much-reduced hardback from that same shop's "Sale" shelves...

Book 2

... I confess my first thought was "worth it just to get the updated CDROM" though I already have the book. Or so I thought. It turns out to be a title I'd somehow managed to miss (and I shall be having words with Junior this weekend as either he snaffled my original copy before the mythical round tuit or he failed to alert me to its publication three years ago — both being capital crimes, of course).

I live and...

... occasionally learn. With a tip of the hat to Brian for the link, it turns out that the Kindle's screensaver can (in all probability) be turned off though if you turn it off and leave wireless on I gather the battery will be sucked dry (as it were). Since I only ever seem to get one particular (and inoffensive) screen displayed, and since (by definition) while it's "screensaving" I'm off somewhere else doing something else and thus couldn't care less, I suppose I could care less (but don't). Still, it's intriguing to learn of an unadmitted hacking mode.

I have no way of...

... knowing what will catch my interest2 from time to time. But having recently read3 the horribly-plausible "Our place in the Cosmos" ...

Book 3

... I just realised there was an elegantly neat encapsulation of Hoyle's ideas in a single paragraph of the foreword by Paul Davies to Simon Mitton's fascinating 2005 biography of the splendid chap: Fred Hoyle: a life in science.

Quote

It would have saved me a lot of time had I recalled it earlier, of course — and, while we're on this subject, perhaps my (f)ailing neurons would care to have a crack at explaining why Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's earlier "Diseases from Space" managed to elude my data base for a little over 30 years? Could it be the lingering shame I felt knowing full well that I'd nicked my friend Hugh's review copy (though, to be fair, he still has my copy of Eric Frank Russell's Sentinels from Space, not to mention David Palmer's second SF novel [which I've never subsequently found... or gone looking for, if I'm honest]). Fair exchange, and all that.

I'm retired, you know. It's what I do.

Immersed in books...

... I've not paid much attention to the weather, but it's not exactly enticing and must have been raining on and off. Not much of a late Spring, that's for sure. I've still got the central heating poised to leap into action, in fact. A not very balmy 21.6C here at 18:45. But then, Carol told me in New York she'd watched it plunge from 86F to 46F and there was snow only a few miles to the north of her little town on the Hudson.

I shall keep an ear cocked for the sound of howling wolves. I already managed to miss the sound of the next Yellow Pages being dumped on my doorstep, in the drizzle. But then, I can't recall having opened its predecessor once in the year I've now had it; I've just brushed some dust off it and moved it to the pending/recycle bin pile.

  

Footnotes

1  Really.
2  Curse that "butterfly mind" that dear Mama was always so quick to criticise, though (truly) I know no other way of thinking.
3  And, indeed, discussed it in passing over an enormous cup of black coffee that 'Costa' classifies as 'medium' only yesterday afternoon (and which left me almost bouncing off the walls as I tried to metabolise the caffeine hit).