2015 — 15 July: Wednesday
I no longer have the stamina to listen1 to the BBC's main radio news bulletin. It sounds daily worse, frankly. "The guvmint is committed to stopping people from needing diabetes-related amputations". How does that work, then? "Greece will now owe 200% of the country's own Gross Domestic Product". How does that work, then?
Recall the old joke: What's a Grecian urn? Oh, about 3 drachma an hour. (Not any more, it seems.)
I once thought...
... the Grauniad was a serious source of news...
... but they missed at least two obvious headlines.
I don't care...
... how famous "a Whig historian" GM Trevelyan2 was — but his "deceptively simple epigraph" still strikes me as almost infinitely depressing and utterly accurate at the same time:
The poetry of history lies in the miraculous fact that once on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.
Why would ghosts vanish at cockcrow? Just askin'. If ghosts exist, by the way, doesn't he defeat his own assertion? Just sayin'. Anyway, if I'm to believe Peter Stothard's amusing book review (and he is the editor of the TLS, after all), Antonia Fraser quotes this Trevelyan early in her own memoir. (Link.)
"Cheeseburger ethics"? Sounds more my sort of thing. Good essay. (Link.)
As I reported...
... to my chum Val in Stockholm back in May 2009: "Tonight I shall watch #4/5 of a BBC show called 'the incredible human journey', hosted by an amiable lady osteo-archaeologist yclept Alice Roberts. Tonight's mystery: how did humans get to Australia3 (or even "why?" perhaps)". That explains Title #1. Meanwhile, David Thomson is a particularly astute film critic, so that explains Title #2. Brian Sewell (who always sounds to me as if he's speaking with an enormous plum in his mouth, but is amusingly acerbic) seems to be concluding that much English contemporary art is, erm, not really very good. Hard to disagree. Hence Title #3.
And the Larkin? Well, that's a bit embarrassing. I've got all his letters, diaries, jazz reviews, and what not, but am actually not over-supplied4 with his poetry. But I recently read a very complimentary assessment of this new collection, so I browsed the notes that accompany a couple of my favourites, hesitated for a moment, and then thought "You know what? The heck with it. Dear Mama would have been absolutely delighted to buy that for me!" (I jest.) So that's Title #4 sorted. I also bought John a copy of Simon Garfield's wonderful 2008 memoir of obsessive stamp collecting — "The Error World" (with that wonderful opening line) to read on his journey.
Big Bro, meanwhile, was further depleting the shelves of M&S for boring stuff, like shirts. Still, he bought me another messy finger food lunch at the Chicago Rib place. And a bottle of Heineken. Yum. [Pause] His latest hobby seems to be making up parcels of his die-cast aircraft models for me to post down to him.
I've been leafing...
... through the 199 pages in the section called "Poems Not Published in the Poet's Lifetime". Some amazing stuff. I believe this is the most I've ever paid for a poetry book (£25) but it's well worth it. And John will now be approaching Swindon yet again. He's due back here on Saturday morning, fully satiated (I hope) by his two days of "plane spotting" at Fairford. We have lots in common, but standing around watching and photographing a variety of aircraft is really not quite my thing.
When one of my occasional visitors departs it somehow makes my house feel emptier than usual for a while. Volumetric hysteresis, perhaps? Normal, I don't doubt, but still a bit unheimlich all the same.
Bother!
Updating the HPLIP service (at HP's invitation, and carefully following their instructions) appears to have broken my ability to print. Grrr. But scanning still works. Semi-Grrr.