2013 — 11 October: Friday - in memory of Roger Christopher Lee
Once again, I'd ask you to excuse the sombre tone of my main heading today. My friend Iris1 lost her husband two weeks ago, so in a few hours from now I shall be making my second trip this week to the new Wessex Vale crematorium to say farewell. Still not my favourite form of social occasion, as I first mentioned here.
I can only hope...
... my latest self-administered hair cut doesn't give too much offence. It's impossible to do that (I don't mean "give too much offence"!) while wearing my glasses, and almost impossible for me to see what I'm doing unless wearing my glasses. An unamusing variant of that old paradox (that isn't really a paradox) about who shaves the barber if he shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself...
Fifty years ago...
... that rascally Jessica Mitford was giving plenty of offence. Source and snippet:
...she called up local undertakers with a fake story about an aged aunt, explaining that the family wanted a cremation without ceremony or coffin. All of the undertakers whom Mitford phoned replied — erroneously — that cremation without a coffin was illegal in California. "In that case, perhaps we could take the body straight to the crematorium in our station wagon?" Mitford asked. "Madam," one undertaker replied after a shocked silence, "the average lady has neither the facilities nor the inclination to be hauling dead bodies around!"
The drizzle held off until shortly before I got back to Technology Towers. Now it's thoroughly gloomy-ish. [Pause] But lightened by the last batch of incoming Michael Garrick jazz CDs:
Very much later
It's bad enough having a high-IQ phone that can barely detect so much as a twitch of a signal downstairs. What's worse is when Junior calls me on it and the jazz that I've got playing2 masks the wholly unfamiliar ringtone for just long enough for me to miss the call halfway up the stairs (in search of more signal), as I'm not quite stupid enough to attempt to key in my PIN to unlock the thing while — forgive the pun — in mid-flight.
Then, on having got upstairs with the damn' thing, the landline phone down in the kitchen promptly starts ringing and, of course, reasoning that it will stop before I get to it, I now simply have to find, untangle, and plug in the upstairs line (which I generally leave unplugged so any unwanted middle-of-the-night cold calls can creep by unheard).
"The weather's too grotty to come down tonight", says my son and heir. "No matter", say I, struggling to hear him over the jazz from the living room, and (I confess) somehow neglecting to mention that I wasn't actually expecting them on my doorstep until tomorrow in any case...
I think that merits another cuppa. KBO