2014 — 31 January: Friday
Now, what do you suppose makes a perfectly good text editor1 suddenly forget how to save an open file as another of a different name? Most aggravating, particularly as it behaves perfectly when not invoked 'from' a WinSCP session. A previously-unprovoked little foible of good old Win8 Pro, I assume. Yet it was working perfectly a mere seven hours ago, he added (probably unnecessarily).
Meanwhile...
... yet more heavy rain is being forecast for the weekend. That's a pity as I currently have a walk pencilled in for this Sunday.
I've read enough...
... by Jenni Diski to have worked out for myself that she is, among other things, sceptical, somewhat depressed, Jewish, and a wonderful writer. She's been reviewing a new book by Barbara Taylor on, well, madness in the light of her [Diski's] personal experiences of treatment — mostly in the late 1960s — for what nowadays is called mental illness. Source and snippet:
Taylor was in the bin during the final days of the old Victorian asylums, before they were shut down in the 1990s, and their patients scattered to the cold liberty of the underfunded,
overlooked region of rented accommodation or life on the street known as 'community care'.
Once I bumped into my own name and a description from my first novel of a ward round I suffered during my own very brief stay at Friern, which I fled to evade the threatened sectioning
that would have allowed them to put me under lock and key and submit me to the treatment of their choice. ('Mm, lobotomy or ECT, it's a toss-up ... ') I thought it a mistake to miss out the
most objectionable thing about that experience of twenty or so suited doctors and social workers sitting in a circle interrogating me: on the coffee table in the centre of the circle, the
open gold cake box with a half-finished cream gâteau inside that no one thought to offer me.
I knew an intelligent chap — a dentist — over 40 years ago, whom I met via family acquaintances and occasional gatherings thereof. We got into the habit of chatting each time we met, and he once confided in me that he used to wonder quite seriously whether he'd be "happier" if he had a lobotomy and then partook of the daily interests and activities (food, drink, sex, TV) that seemed to satisfy everyone else. At the time (I was a callow youth) I had no answers for him. And I wasn't particularly surprised to learn he committed suicide.
Which pissed his wife off no end.
Today's little...
... mission of mercy, already accomplished before breakfast, was to nip out to Waitrose ahead of the scavenging wolves to find a couple of packs of a black Chinese tea I was previously unaware of — "Keemun" — for Mike, who tells me it can be drunk without milk. My word, it's miserably cold and drizzly out there.
Now this is the sort of heart-warming story that really makes me wonder what humans have ever done to deserve this planet.
The weather...
... hereabouts is getting steadily more horrible as I sup my (lateish) post-lunch cuppa. Grrr.
This is very nearly...
... the final graphic in Tuesday's big, fat, heavy Taschen book of the things. Which I've only just finished. (It's been a surprisingly busy week, considering the awesomely small number of things I've actually managed to do.)
I don't know which is more upsetting: the fact that only 7% of us have a computer, or that the graphic designer — Toby Ng — chose the truly horrible Apple "Super Mouse" as the basis for his visual example. His taste in fonts is much better.
It's still raining, dagnabbit. Not even Dvorak's Symphony #9 can quite fully compensate for the filthy weather tonight. I expect Suzanne Vega will be better able to, in half an hour or so.