2014 — 24 February: Monday
I should simply have recalled the parenting that Christa and I did in earlier years: when in doubt, don't do, or say, what (my) mother did, or said. Just do the opposite. It worked pretty well on Peter, but my skills had become rusty. Anyway, I took my new philosophy1 out for an experimental spin during the kinder visit yesterday afternoon. Result? A much less fractious time, so I think I'll try to stick to it in future. After all, I'd rather be recalled with kindly affection, on balance. Life's too short, and a good deal too precious... and all that.
Meanwhile...
... I face the first of a trio of sessions with Dr Fang later this morning — all in pursuit of saving the tooth that was expensively (re)-root-filled shortly before Xmas. Can't think of a better, more fun-packed way to start the week; can you?
And I was tickled by an email last night from Mike telling me that he, too, has just ordered the "Game of Thrones" Blu-ray boxset after "powering through" the Season #1 set I lent him to try. His one-word "Subject" line just said "Wow!" which recalls the telegram Victor Hugo is said to have received from his publisher when he'd sent one reading "?" to enquire about sales of Les Mis.
My daily habit...
... of glancing back through this ¬blog2 occasionally pays off. For example, I see that it's five years to the day since I last looked for a DVD of the BBC TV series "Common as Muck":
My patience is to be rewarded next month, it seems, by the very-long-overdue release of what even the BFI called a "landmark drama".
Unrestored by...
... so much as a simple cuppa after Dr Fang had had his evil way with me, it was straight back out to cure the recurring echo in Mother Hubbard's cupboard. Which is why it's now 12:39 or so and I'm a mite peckish. Though I must remember not to bite too fiercely lest I dislodge the next-gen temporary crown ahead of the next session. Such good fun.
Christa often enjoyed...
... coffee and a cake of an afternoon, particularly on a Sunday. It was rather a Becker family tradition, in fact. So I've just (momentarily) revived it, though without her, without the coffee (and, indeed, without the cake) in celebration of what seems to have been a successful ebook file transfer into the Kindle application on each of BlackBeast, the Android Tablet and the Kindle ebook reader without at any point having to trouble any part of the Amazon ebook management system on the Mothership. Of course, it now remains to be seen whether or not I'll be able to sync my reading progress across all three platforms. That may just be a step too far.
Having cleared out those two kitchen storage cupboards yesterday, I've now also cleared out (some might say "expunged") rather a lot of the Jane Austen "Pride and Prejudice" FanFic titles that have been cluttering up the place lately, they having been the subject of an earlier (mild) obsession. Chaps need hobbies, but Sense and Sensibility Moderation in all things...
One cannot live...
... purely on a literary diet of fantasy, so I was gently browsing through one of last month's acquisitions: Richard Davenport-Hines' edited version of Hugh Trevor-Roper's "Wartime Journals" — the nearest he [H T-R] could get to publishing a diary given the fact that he'd been expressly ordered not to keep one as a British Intelligence Officer during the second world war. It took him a while, but he eventually reached a fairly unsurprising / universal conclusion about his colleagues:
S.I.S.
There are only two classes of men in the British Secret Service, — those who protect their incompetence by neurotic secrecy, and those who screen it with bombastic advertisement.
Elegant and unkind. Almost certainly accurate, too.
What were we thinking?
Mike was telling me about the newly re-mastered Blu-ray of the 1974 film "A Boy and his Dog" (based, pretty faithfully, on Harlan Ellison's 1969 Nebula Award winning story). I've tried (unsuccessfully) to watch this before, more than once. So I dug out one of my (four, at last count) copies of the original story and re-read it. Austen, it ain't.