2014 — 29 April: Tuesday

Given the relative brightness "out there" this morning I was a little surprised by the amount of rain currently falling.1 Sufficient unto the day, however, is the 'evil' thereof. Mutter, mutter.

Having just cracked...

... wide open the case of the Annoyingly Incorrect Aspect Ratio I watched the first-ever episode of "One Foot in the Grave" yesterday evening and (just as Brian had suggested I might) I actually laughed aloud at several points. I'd never previously watched the series with any assiduity, and had certainly never seen the "opener" as I was completely unaware that the job from which Victor had been unceremoniously "retired" had been as a uniformed security guard.

I remain, however, on far more of a reading and listening kick at the moment. Case in point: having heard some of the Martin Sixsmith2 BBC Radio 4 pieces on the history and treatment of things that go awry in the noggin last night I treated myself to a skim through the entire 550 pages or so of the late Roy Porter's Faber Book of Madness...

Faber Book of Madness

... without finding anything much to laugh about, unless you count the Long March of sustained human folly and ignorance. Or the classic extract from "Catch-22". Sometimes, I derive amusement purely from observing the array of things that catch what passes for my attention from time to time.

Dear Mama's "butterfly mind" at work, no doubt. But 'twas ever thus :-)

I bought...

... the most recent (Dry store room No. 1) of the three books I have by Richard "Professor Trilobite" Fortey after I started this ¬blog retirement hobby. But until Len tipped me off about "The Magic of Mushrooms" I don't recall ever having seen the amiable chap on the hoof, as it were. So I've just squandered a bunch of my bandwidth bits on a hi-def download of that BBC4 documentary. It looks very interesting.

On a fruitier topic, I...

... first encountered a pomegranate in the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's wonderful "Tanglewood Tales"3 while reading the heart-rending story of Proserpina in "The Pomegranate Seeds". And I last ate one that Christa bought for me a mere 2,668 days ago. But I've yet to think of anything to pour my recently-acquired pomegranate molasses over. I'll get there. (My current breakfast cereal topping is a delicious stewed mix of plums, cranberries, and blueberries with added raisins tossed in.)

Five a day? Pah!

Two years...

... to the day since I last looked for it, I naturally found the booklet (with its poems by Roger McGough, text by John Emsley) that accompanied an interesting 1991 Channel 4 documentary on some of the chemical elements...

The Elements

... precisely where it should have been. But why didn't I look there in the first place? The other book I have by Emsley riffs on Mussorgsky. Now where might that be, I wonder? :-)

Emsley book #2

The only reason I was able to find it within a minute is because it happens to live on one of the few bookshelves that was blissfully untroubled by the Great Central Heating Upheaval and concomitant Offsite Book Storage Adventure of 2010.

It's been, dare I ...

... admit it, over quarter of a century since I bought a couple of purely instrumental bits of musical frippery by "Acoustic Alchemy". They made a point of not incorporating any vocal material. The resultant easy-listening "cocktail lounge" light jazz-rock isn't really to my taste. However, while I was munching the Mounce lunch, I've been playing a somewhat more upmarket just-delivered variation on a similar (mostly no vocals) theme:

Wagner minus warbling

Much more to my taste and — he added, provocatively — surely the only way to listen to Wagner's turgid melodrama. Not quite as condensed, perhaps, as Bugs Bunny's masterful 7-minute "What's Opera, Doc?" but definitely getting there.

Setting aside dear Mama's snailmails, I also received the remaining DVDs that I'd ordered while in pursuit of a replacement copy of one of my Lost Sheep:

4 noir DVDs

That was a rumble of thunder, dagnabbit!

I listened...

... with great interest to the programme about Arnold Bennett — an author I've never read — looked over the Wikipedia entry on him, discovered he stayed at the same hotel4 I'd stayed in (in 1959, on my first ever trip to London for a fabulous two-week holiday visiting museums), followed a hyperlink to the hotel, and landed delightedly here.

Christa and I had watched an Open University documentary about Art Deco. I then bought the V&A Exhibition catalogue, and we managed to attend their Art Deco exhibition early in July 2003. The Art Deco lobby from that hotel was one of the exhibits. Small world, heh? [Pause] The rain has been, briefly, very heavy.

Pulcinella...

... (even if only a suite from it) played by Yo-Yo Ma accompanied by Kathryn Stott. What's not to like? Last time I actually saw him play (in a sense; bear with me here) was in the Second Season Noël episode of "The West Wing" in which poor Josh was melting down with PTSD in the wake of his near-fatal shooting.

It's over 10 years...

... since I last watched said Lost Sheep, apparently...

Last watched!

Sounds like a typical week off work. I don't recall the problem with the Mercedes, but it wasn't long after this that we traded it in for Christa's beloved Mini Cooper S :-)

  

Footnotes

1  It doesn't bode too well for the walk we've arranged tomorrow.
2  Hands up. Who knew this former BBC foreign correspondent had such an interest? Not I, for one.
3  That would have been in Wilmslow in 1958 or 1959, though I didn't manage to track down my own copy — a surprisingly well-maintained 1906 'Everyman' edition — until September 2005.
4  Supposedly because it "offered a bedside light during his periods of insomnia".