2014 — 29 June: Sunday
A pleasantly dull1 start to the morning, with a gentle stroll up and round St Catherine's Hill arranged for a bit later on. Just tell me how we can be already halfway through yet another year...
Yes, I'm anti-monarchy
Why isn't everyone else?
As for Charles's profligacy, you might as well ask Kubla Khan why he a stately pleasure-dome decreed. "The Prince of Wales lives the life of the heir to the throne," a courtier said. "He
lives in London in a royal palace and has staff who enable him to do the job that he and her Royal Highness have created for themselves."
This superb condescension, far more revealing than a sketchy summary of accounts, suggests a royal household whose character is already less redolent of the restraint and Tupperware
associated with the current monarch than of her heir's evident conviction of his own, semi-divine exceptionalism. Niggling questions of a monetary nature cannot be allowed to burden this
authority on every aspect of political, aesthetic, environmental, physical and spiritual life, whose worldly requirements, from private trains to immaculately boiled eggs, nonetheless
transcend all the usual constraints of sensitivity and proportion.
More here, no doubt.
Happily, I sailed...
... safely back through Otterbourne half an hour before the road closure for their summer fête jalopy racing. Now all I have to think about, freshly showered and laundry set a'laundering, is a bite or two to keep lunchtime body and soul in close proximity.
Only when...
... listening to the "TED Radio Hour" — on NPR... where else? — which is dealing with originality, patents, copying and what-not did I finally learn that Led Z's "Stairway to Heaven" is really a rip-off ("homage" sounds better) of "Taurus" from the 1968 album by Spirit called, rather unoriginally, "Spirit". I'd never noticed that but can agree, after listening, that there might be something to it.
This is the...
... typically self-deprecating — not to say, paradoxical — introduction that Ernest Bramah provides to his short story "Smothered Corpses":
The author of the following story deems it permissible to himself to explain that the work was projected, and, indeed, almost completed, as a 120,000 word serial of feuilleton scope, when a much-advertised competition for stories of not more than 4000 words in length came under his notice. Not to be deterred by the conditions, he at once set himself to the formidable task of reducing his manuscript to one-thirtieth of its original length. The result must, of course, be regarded purely on its merits, but in the writer's own opinion the process of compression has, if anything, keyed up the action to an even tenser pitch, without in any way detracting from the interest of the plot or circumscribing the wealth of incident.
To my shame, I had to look up the definition of "feuilleton".
For my (late)...
... evening entertainment I chose a Spike Lee film — "Inside Man" — that Christa and I first watched together in mid-2007, and which I then re-watched with Peter in mid-March 2008. I eventually turned my DVD of it into a Blu-ray in November 2012, and have now watched that twice. Great music. And it's as neatly twisted as the rather earlier Bill Murray comedy variant "Quick Change".