2014 — 18 July: Friday
Until the sun winds round a little further1 it's still 'safe' to have the patio door open and the curtains undrawn. It's when the breeze — what little there is — coming in is above ambient inside that I need to lurch into action.
I shall be...
... heading north for today's lunchtime rendezvous. The local weather map suggests it will be rather similar to jungle conditions up there in a few hours from now. Now currently being 07:03 or so. Still, it's nice to hear that I'm already over-achieving on David Attenborough's call for householders to let a patch of their garden "go wild" to help butterflies. It's all getting too reminiscent of conditions in the Po valley in 1965, or any random summer in Meisenheim for that matter.
Meanwhile, there's Episode #3 of "The Honourable Woman" to be snaffled down the electric string, and the Proms start tonight with a chap name of Elgar.
Oh, good grief
Philosophers. What are they good for?
For decades his main "hobby" was photographing St Petersburg and Venice, returning numerous times and taking countless shots of the buildings in different light: in St Petersburg each photograph captures the snow under
grey skies. "I may be somewhat unusual," he told the New Yorker, "in the fact that I never get tired or sated with what I love most, so that I don't need or want variety."
The photographic holidays are no more. After three years of snowless Februaries in St Petersburg, Derek regards that project as complete. A reformed duomaniac, he's now a mere monomaniac: from now on, it's all and only
philosophy. He's busy on another book, Does Anything Really Matter?, in which he'll respond to critical responses to On What Matters.
One (I) can't help recalling the philosopher (Oolon Colluphid) mentioned by Douglas Adams. Should I worry that I was completely unaware of the very existence of the "cerebral couple" in this profile?
I vaguely remember...
... snorting, last night, on hearing the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition promising to re-nationalise the UK railway system (if there's actually anything left of it by the time he's no longer in opposition).
I may have been hallucinating. I get that a lot in hot weather.
I've just discovered...
... a mistake I made precisely two years ago. Since I got out of the habit of expecting to find my books alphabetically where they "should" be (in the wake of the Great Central Heating Upheavals of 2010) I simply never looked in the 'right' place before confidently asserting that "My copy of Elias Canetti's rather turgid "Crowds and Power" left my dusty shelves at some point after August 1995." Wrong!
Not wrong about the turgidity, though.
Nine or so...
... hours later, I've just flung a hasty chicken supper down the hatch having spent over an hour in an horrendous queue of (I suppose) typical Friday evening eve-of-holiday traffic. Still, we had a nice lunch, a grand chatter, some death-by-chocolate cake, and Gill even got to watch (with a certain amount of chagrin on my part) as I successfully applied the 900MB set of accumulated patches that tipped her Laptop PC safely over into Win8.1 Update 1 with almost none of the hassle I'd experienced with poor old BlackBeast three months ago.
Of course, she still has the challenges imposed by the further 250MB or so of patches accumulated, but hidden from her, while she left that step unstepped, but by then it was time for me to fold my tent and creep away.