2015 — 10 October: Saturday
Good grief! Why didn't anyone tell me it's already part way through the afternoon?1
Amazing...
... how Time gets disregarded during one of my rare 'creative' streaks.
Today's votive offering...
... from Mr Postie to the god in charge of (the emptying of) my bank account:
If its title isn't an oxymoron then I don't know what is. And, in the opinion of one reviewer, its core conclusion is "much of what is said and thought about nuclear policy today remains hobbled by a pervasive ignorance of history (even, or perhaps especially, among nuclear policy experts)". I'm tempted to ask what policy isn't similarly hobbled?
I don't know...
... who Gabriel Prokofiev is, but he's been choosing some cracking music, Gromit.
I do know...
... who Robert Harling was, but my only question was "From where?" Turns out the answer was "from here":
Marriage to an Oxford contemporary followed soon after graduation but didn't last. "The life of the young married Mrs Ian White-Thomson, wife of the rising young business executive in a firm called Borax, came less and less to suit me,"
she wrote in The Last Curtsey. "I hated the monotony ... Most of all I loathed the weekends with Ian's sociable military family in Essex. The shoots, the tennis parties, the before-lunch Sunday drinks parties. The routine
became anathema."
After a stint on House and Garden under the editor Robert Harling, who "ran his office as an amiable harem" and who, as a typographical expert, introduced her to the work of Eric Gill, MacCarthy joined the Guardian...
A lovely piece by Paul Laity featuring Fiona MacCarthy in the Grauniad's occasional "A life in writing" series. MacCarthy's book The Last Curtsey (which I bought on the day our ex-LEO, ex-ICL, friends the Smythsons called in for light refreshments)...
... is very well worth a dip into, too. She was one of very few debs from 1958 who went on to university. Jessica Mitford, I note, described the Debutante Season as "the specific, upper-class version of the puberty rite". I recall dear Mama leafing through glossy magazines of the sort that featured such young ladies. The past is definitely a foreign country. And long may it remain so.
On the whole...
... I was more impressed by Hunter Thompson's 'gonzo' brand of "new journalism" than I ever was by Tom Wolfe's. My chosen snippet doesn't feature either of them. Nonetheless, it made me laugh. Source:
My child looks at me like, well, like a 13-year-old girl being taken on a suicide mission to visit a 2,000-year-old man — and then crawls on all fours across the wing, to squeeze into the doggy door on the side.
"Where's the other pilot?" I ask, before following.
"It's jes' me," the pilot says, with a chuckle. It's a reassuring chuckle. A faintly southern chuckle — though he's not from the South. "Something happens to me, here's what you do," he says as he straps himself in. "This
lever here." He grabs a red knob beside his seat. "This shuts down the engine. Jes' pull that back and you shut it down. And this lever here... " He grabs a bright-red handle on the ceiling over his head. "Yank down on this
with 45 pounds of pressure. That'll release the parachute."
"The parachute?"
"No sense having the engine running with the parachute open," he says, ignoring the 10 questions that naturally precede the one to which this is the answer.
I suspect Big Bro will share my reaction.
It's been...
... exactly four years since I watched "Thor" so, because I was lent a copy of "Thor: the dark world", see if you can guess what I've just watched? And quite enjoyed?