2014 — 20 December: Saturday

Undeterred by the little blighters waging virological1 warfare down in the cellular trenches, my body clock woke me up about six hours after shutting me down. No change there, then.

I obviously need to 'up' the percentage of Scotch in my lemon and honey toddie :-)

I gather...

... the idiots who name days hereabouts are now trying to get this one called "Panic Saturday". I shall not be joining the frenzied hordes of (I assume) shoppers.

I mentioned Pepsodent t'other day. An email tells me that Mandy Rice Davies was used at some point as its "smiling girl". And l'affaire Profumo (reading about which in the Manchester Evening News until my parents realised, and confiscated it) introduced me to my first physics paradox: the one-way mirror. I couldn't figure out how that could possibly work...

Today's delivery...

... of a book called "Here" by Richard McGuire (that I saw Chris Ware reviewing in the Grauniad)...

Richard McGuire book

... began 'life' as a six-page comic in RAW2 way back in 1989. It has an intriguing concept: the story of a corner of a room showing the events occurring in that same space over many hundreds of thousands of years.

Just had my usual...

... pre-Xmas chat with my favourite weekend staff nurse at dear Mama's care-home. If I didn't know better I'd say she might be starting to prepare me for the "end game". I have, of course, been fully-prepared for said game for a long time. dM is currently under the weather and thus being nursed in bed. Yet another bang to her arm which, as her skin is a lot like tissue paper, marks very easily. She is, I am warned, "very old". (Tell me something I don't know, Jan!) Ever onward but, perhaps, not quite forever onward.

Given dear Mama's firmly expressed wish (when last able to express such things) in the last several years to "go to sleep and not wake up" or "take a pill and not wake up" or simply "go home where she can be looked after 'properly' by her own parents" there's really not much to say, is there? She will — if she makes it through the first week of January — be 98. I believe that's actually setting a Mounce family record.

  

Footnotes

1  Or, possibly, bacteriological.
2  A Venn diagram of my (wide-ranging) interests in underground comix and Spiegelman and Mouly's large-format art comic (if that's what RAW was) would have little overlap.