2013 — 7 October: Monday
It's easy to see1 that the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us. Meanwhile, the reason for the persistent hammering yesterday evening reveals itself to have been my young neighbour's attempt to remove the small brick pillars from both sides of his front wall in an attempt (I assume) to make it less easy for he and his wife to (further) scrape the sides of their vehicle as they manoeuvre on to their drive.
It's oddly gratifying not to be the worst driver hereabouts. Though, given the prevailing belief system next door, it would have been less work had they simply prayed for guidance. But perhaps they tried that already? I just hope the bit of "party" wall isn't so weakened by the continuous assaults over the last 30 years ("insults", as a previous neighbour2 expressed it) as to collapse into a heap of discontinuous rubble, forcing me to take action.
"For what do we live," (as the divine Jane put it) "but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn"? (Fascinating answers in the essay at the link here.)
Better get some breakfast before heading out on a post-school-run supplies-run. There's also a lot of local entropic variation needed before Technology Towers is quite ready to receive its next two sets of pending weekend visitors, even if they are (mostly) blood relatives. Deep Joy.
It is said...
... that an unexamined Life is not worth the living, is it not? (Greek philosophy tended not to crop up [much] during the aeronautical engineering themes of my tertiary education.) Be that as it may, I receive daily, self-inflicted, reminders of my mortality and my age. It amuses me to look back through this ridiculous diary to see what (if anything) I got up to on the corresponding day in years past, which is one reason I'm now (again) listening to Jean Michel Jarre's 1984 album "Zoolook".
It was the first of his that I hadn't bought on vinyl, and I got it for £9-99 from HMV in Soton on 29 November 1984. It was my 141st CD, and sounds a lot fresher 29 years further along Life's rubble-strewn highway than its owner feels :-)
Having...
... topped up my rapacious fridge I'm gently exposing myself to some Verdi in the background (there are some truly bizarre and rather Gothic plots) while scanning recently-arrived and/or just-bought (in Asda) entertainment options:
I must say the plot of my previous "Beautiful Creatures" is vastly different from this more modern one.
Step Lively, now!
A beautifully-written piece. Source and snippet:
We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage — 41 years, for me: alone in bed, alone most of the time, without that presence towards which you turned for advice, reassurance, with whom you shared the good news and the bad. Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience — everywhere, always — so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted. I didn't tell myself that at the time, and I doubt if it would have helped if I had, but it is what I have come — not so much to feel as to understand.
The sun shines on. The barometer is up. And it's definitely time for some (late) lunch. Is that a prawn salad I see in my near future? I rather think so.
How typically...
... British. If the report in the last issue of "Private Eye" is to be believed, we are the world's sixth largest economy, but the largest tax haven... one created hand-in-hand with the beancounters, lucratively exploited by the beancounters and then "independently" endorsed by the beancounters. That's a lot of beans. Not really something to be proud of, is it?
Quite a bit later
I thoroughly enjoyed "Beautiful Creatures" and may yet get the set of books. I was unaware of the film until I caught a trailer for it on the front of something else recently.