2015 — 20 June: Saturday
A cooler start1 offset by the initial morning cuppa.
My scanning...
... of recent DVD artwork last night hit an odd glitch I need to investigate. Mild rainbow streaks made an unwelcome appearance. This may be an artefact of the particular cover's colour block printed dot size, in which case slightly changing the angle of the art on the flatbed may be enough to fix it — provided I can then use the GIMP and/or Inkscape to rotate the image "back" to vertical. Not a feature I've yet had to invoke.
Setting aside...
... the BBC news report that "US scientists say" we could render ourselves (and many other vertebrates) extinct2 alongside the many thousands of species we're already finished off, compare and contrast these two thumbnails:
A truly minor-scale triumph in the scale of things. 5° did the trick. [Pause] Here's Cassandra, on an Athenian vase from 5th century BC:
She's suffering a common fate of those who tell inconvenient truths to power. Her curse? Always to tell the truth, never to be believed. As Pogo remarked, "We've met the enemy. And he is us!"
After Mr Postie...
... had shoved two envelopes from BP on to my doormat (pretty quick response, I felt, after my little débâcle yesterday) the rest of my Saturday morning was spent doing precisely the envelope stuffing I'd missed out on yesterday. Envelope #2, in a pleasing but unrelated irony, contained the first (and now last) dividend cheque payable to me as Executor. All previous such dividends were simply being used to buy further shares for the last quarter of a century, which is how she came to own so many of the things in the first place. Well done, Mother!
Until I receive a final assessment from Brenda's gangs in the tax office and the state pension office — and they warned me it could take them at least eight weeks for them to do their ruminating — I reckon I've now done all I can to wrap up dear Mama's estate. I've just sent an itemised breakdown of my Probate Summary over to Big Bro. It's been just over three months since the proverbial bucket was kicked. Still, I should now be able to afford a slightly better class of stale crust and cheese rind for a while.
I enjoy noting...
... coincidences and anniversaries (of most sorts; not all, of course). Given that, with luck, I've now dealt with dear Mama's BP shares, I had to smile when I saw what I'd written six years ago today:
One of dear Mama's more prescient moves, back in the mid-1960s, was to invest in "Oil and Energy" quite some time before any gas or oil had been confirmed under the North Sea.
And, on my 29th wedding anniversary in 2003, I'd used one of my weekly letters to tell the ol' girl about another rather quixotic Mounce family "investment" from the 1960s — the one that Dad had made when he staggered home one evening clutching two £5 "mint" bags of pre-decimal 1967 halfpennies (that's 4,800 of the blessed things). She'd been keeping them, all individually wrapped over three decades earlier by yours truly, in a little strongbox... and wondered if, in fact, they had yet soared in value:
... so many of the things were minted in the last four or five years of that denomination that, 36 years later, they are currently felt to be unlikely to fetch more than 20p each at the most. So that means you're sitting on a potential pile of £192 or thereabouts, max. That's a return comfortably above inflation, of course, and certainly better than bank account interest, come to that, and many UK shares over the same period, but sadly still not quite up in the Old Masters category.
Mysteriously, it's now way past time for my evening meal. Today's BBC Radio 3 Jazz has been exceptionally fine. But for now, where's that stale crust got to?
I've long felt the allure of the Miles Davis version of "Concierto De Aranjuez" in the Gil Evans arrangement on that lovely "Sketches of Spain" album from 1959. I bought my initial CD of it in either Dallas or Orlando, Florida (more likely the latter) one weekend in July 1984 in between two weeks of meetings and CICS Primer try-outs. Matters not which; CDs were few and far between back then. But now I have to admit the version I downloaded a lot more recently by Jim Hall and Chet Baker is not at all bad. It's from "Together: the complete studio recordings". Perfect listening for this time of night.