2014 — 14 March: Friday
This morning's mist1 is improving the signal to (noise, he craftily added, after the omission was pointed out) ratio hereabouts, by cutting down the dull roar from the motorway. I like it when that happens. After all, when we bought this house in 1981 we had no idea there would be a busy, noisy motorway built quite so near, quite so soon. (It does come in quite handy, though, I must admit.)
Yesterday evening's...
... entertainment saw Season #2 of "True Blood" spiralling down towards the end into gloriously bonkers tosh. My second viewing (more than four years after my first one) is proving a good choice. Yes, of course it's rubbish, but it's greatly enjoyable rubbish :-)
For reasons...
... that needn't concern us unduly, I have to admit that sometimes my books database turns out to be not the most reliable cultural artefact in the house. It suggests, for example, that the only title I have by John Carey is the book he assembled in 1987 as the "Faber Book of Reportage", though exactly where that is on my shelves2 is a different kettle of something or other. The chap is now emeritus professor of English at Oxford and has a new book reflecting on his nearly 60 years in academia. It sounds pretty interesting, if this THES article is more reliable than my database. Source and snippet:
And there were also, of course, "toffs" everywhere. When Carey was asked to take over the teaching of English literature at Christ Church, then considered Oxford's most aristocratic and
exclusive college, for the academic year 1958-59, he says now, "it really was like Brideshead Revisited. The snobbery was astonishing."
"One student told me about a night in the year when the idea was to break more windows in Peckwater Quadrangle than your father or grandfather had done. So it created a maelstrom of glass.
He was quite innocently walking through and a piece from a tonic-water bottle bounced off a wall and blinded him in one eye. He was absolutely unresentful. He was a public schoolboy and
regarded that as the kind of risk you take: young gentlemen will let off steam — and if you were in the way, you were in the way."
'Nuff said.
I first read...
... of the ongoing disaster that has been the UK's consistent track record on "housing policy" when I first read Dick Crossman's ministerial diaries back in the 1970s. The sorry saga continues.
Hah! Found it!
My mistake had been to assume I was looking for a hardback:
Now, on with my next crockpot prep. That should take me somewhat nearer my lunch date.
Having tried...
... (but failed) last month to get me to keep their credit card at the front of my wallet, my bank's new ploy is to tempt me with 7.9% APR on balance transfers to it from other cards for the next year. Erm, what balances? Should they ever decide simply to give me money I might be more interested. [Pause] Also waiting on the doorstep for me on my return from a delicious lunch and post-prandial chat was that 'modern' film noir from 1981 that Amazon.de told me was finally out on Blu-ray:
Scripted by David Mamet, too. Come to think of it, that was a pretty good year for the genre — consider Kasdan's "Body Heat" for example.