2014 — 2 August: Saturday
When I last checked the feather warcast1 it was suggesting my windows would be getting an automated cleaning overnight. Turns out not to have been the case. I wonder what mischief shall befall me today? Nothing before breakfast, I trust.
Evidence...
... that the UK guvmint's domestic tracking abilities lag behind (say) those of our North American cousins so clearly demonstrated in many a hi-tech fictional piece of junk TV is contained in the news that we cannot even collect parking fines incurred by Johnny Foreigner driving European cars here as their vehicles don't have to be registered until they have been in the UK for six months. I won't ask how we know (after six months) that they remain unregistered. An "estimated" 3,000,000 cars enter the UK each year. Couldn't we (micro)chip the things? I suppose, at one every ten seconds it might require a few more of Brenda's goons recruiting for the task.
In December 1974 — as Christa and I once again entered the UK (for the first time as a married couple) at Dover following our first Xmas trip to Meisenheim three months after our UK marriage — one of said goons told us (with a certain relish in his tone) that because Christa was now married to a UK citizen (subject, but let's not quibble) thereby gaining leave to enter the UK for an indefinite period (rather than the six months that had up to then been regularly stamped in her passport) we now had to pay import duty on her car. Though it was not yet registered here. That was a bit of a shock. Had I not been carrying a credit card (with a pretty miniscule limit) her German-registered car would have been impounded2 on the spot. That piece of bureaucratic pettiness still rankles 40 years later.
Mildly amusing3 side note: I knew perfectly well I'd already mentioned this incident in a footnote in this ¬blog, so I asked my desktop search tool Copernic to show me occurrences of the phrase "Anything to declare". Up popped precisely two. One was on 5 February 2007. The other? Buried in a PDF file of Heinlein's not terribly well-known novel "Podkayne of Mars" of all places! Now that I had forgotten!
Now, what about that breakfast?
What piece of stupidity made my online bank think I'd want to watch a preview of their brand new TV ad? Let alone buy a copy of Kylie Minogue's singing that (I assume) accompanies it.
In the early 1960s...
... I developed a taste for what passed for satire. One of the books I read at that time was "The Joneses: How to keep up with them". What I learned only today, however, is that it was Edith Wharton's family that supposedly inspired that particular idiom. Only last week in Waterstone's — while browsing casually through the first book of erotic stories that "Everyman Library" has just published, purely to see what that venerable imprint deems "erotic", of course — I noted the appearance in print of her long-suppressed "Beatrice Palmato" fragment (of a tale of paternal incest) from an unpublished short story. Further research of that little gem of literature is left to others.
This is a family diary, after all :-)
And, with the end of Brian Matthew's show, here comes that rain. [Pause] President Obama says that CIA torturers should not be judged "too harshly" because of the pressure they were under? Words fail me. Actually, the CIA don't call it "torture". They prefer "enhanced interrogation techniques". So that's OK, then.
It's possible...
... there may exist, somewhere, some sad people who don't appreciate the wit and wisdom of this fabulous trio:
As for "The Idiots Abroad": the story begins in archetypal fashion, with Franklin once again telling Fat Freddy to "score us some smoke". Within five pages, Fat Freddy is involved with a gang of international terrorists disguised as soccer fans, Phineas is stuck on a plane to Mecca where he will become the richest man in the world, and Franklin is on his way to Colombia with a survivalist group. The plot takes in global domination, a military/terrorist pact, and the spectacle of Fat Freddy and Franklin becoming re-educated to civilised standards. The depiction of their astonishment at being asked to repeat the first lines of the Iliad is, well, a picture. Naturally, there is no dope at all in any of this, and when it reappears, it merely serves to stunt our heroes' intellects so that they are back to their originally brutish levels. It is not often one sees a nuclear bomb being traded for a packet of coloured rolling papers.
I was reminded of this particular tome by a link to a Nicholas Lezard review of it in the first paragraph of his more recent review of a book about cats. I got my copy of the "Freaks" in February 2005, on the same day I picked up an exquisite JL ("Harpole Report") Carr edition...
... of Gwen Raverat wood engravings. Stylistically somewhat different, I admit.
At least...
... hacking away the similarly-speedily growing brambles in the front (and slightly lesser) jungle yielded about half a dozen blackberries to sweeten the task. They do taste nicer straight, as it were, from the source. All I have to do now is await the start of any itches on exposed limbs from opportunistic biters/blighters that were lurking to pounce on their ambulatory food source. Me. It's (un)jolly humid out there.
As I mentioned...
... nearly a month ago, the blighters who supply my energy sent me a snailmail demanding an extra £1 per month, although they puzzled me by also telling me that they intended to start taking the new amount four months earlier. Beep! Just had an (evening!) email from them. "We've reviewed your direct debit." they say. "This time, you've built up a credit balance of £310.20. We're going to refund this within the next 10 days. And your Direct Debit payment is changing from £117 to £88 — this is to cover the cost of the energy you'll use until your next Annual Review."
I hope they're not suggesting this is my fault. After all, they get the meter readings and control the direct debits. They must think I'm pretty dim, I fear, as they also feel the need to show their working!
I would have been (a lot) more impressed if all three red boxes had been neatly aligned. Tee-hee. Needless to say, I did not build up that credit balance just during the month that's elapsed since their inept snailmail, either. Still "Gift horse, mouth, a, don't look, in the"...
Tea! I feel an urge to celebrate. I shall maintain a stoic silence regarding what happens when you divide £1176-86 by 12 :-)