2015 — 11 November: Wednesday
And so I move smoothly into my ninth year without Christa by my side.1 No reason not to have a picture of her, though. Here's one I took on the 26th November 2006, less than a month after I'd begun my pre-retirement vacation:
As Penelope Lively wrote, in October 2013:
We have each known that grim rite of passage, have engaged with grief and loss, and have not exactly emerged but found a way of living after and beyond. It is an entirely changed life, for anyone who has been in a long marriage... Every decision now taken alone; no one to defuse anxieties. And a thoroughly commonplace experience — everywhere, always — so get on with it and don't behave as though you are uniquely afflicted.
Easier said than done, at times :-)
Meanwhile, Big Bro...
... has assured me his spiffy new car's number plate is not a vanity affair. Methinks the lad doth protest too much. Once upon a time I might have calculated the odds of getting a plate with his exact initials and birthday...
On that thought, g'nite!
Unlikely...
... though it may sound, there's a little hole in the clouds offering a glimpse of a blue sky up there, even at 07:34 this morning. Always a nice thing to see. [Pause] I've decided to take Zeno's advice — so there's a pleasant blast of high-energy Scarlatti harpsichord (Pierre Hantaï has the flying fingers) to accompany my morning cuppa.
I fear the nearest...
... I can get to Stephen Grosz (quite possibly because of my strong feelings of personal antipathy to his pseudo-scientific "profession")...
It's not only fiction that does this to me. I am told, for example, that Stephen Grosz's book The Examined Life — a psychoanalyst giving us his most interesting case histories — is a work of genius and is selling like hotcakes. I buy a copy, and halfway through I toss it away, literally, at the wall, in intense irritation. How can people like these stories, with their over-easy packaging of what are no doubt extremely complex personal problems, their evident and decidedly unexamined complacency about the rightness of the analyst's intervention?
... is the similarly-named George, whose vastly-different 1976 book "Ecce homo: 100 drawings" I picked up in March 1979. It had been banned for its political criticism, not the nudes.
Another...
... pseudo-scientific "profession" — that of publishing — is well-roasted here. I particularly liked the maladroit assessment of Heller's sublime "Catch-22". How could anyone fail to find it funny? My un-psycho-analysed mind boggles, and decides it's time for some breakfast.
Very little surprises me...
... about the boy Dave these days:
In leaked correspondence with the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire county council (which covers his own constituency), David Cameron expresses his horror at the cuts being made to local services. This is the point at which you realise that he
has no conception of what he has done.
The letters were sent in September, but came to light only on Friday, when they were revealed by the Oxford Mail.
The national media has been remarkably slow to pick the story up, given the insight it offers into the prime minister's detachment from the consequences of his actions.
More cake, anyone? [Pause] Here's a telling stat, too, bearing on the boy's sidekick, our fragrant and much-beloved Saint Theresa:
We will acquiesce to the scanning of Facebook posts to fight terrorism, which has killed 56 people in the UK in 10 years, but will still regard the killing of two women a week by their partners as a private domestic matter. God knows what this whole shambles says about us all psychologically. May herself gives the impression that the only childhood affection she got was the time a horse mistook her knuckles for a corn cob. At least this bill has allowed me to decode her permanently appalled expression: she looks as if she's just seen my internet history.
Patience is...
... not only a virtue, but is invariably well-rewarded, is it not? My next crockpot will mark a return to the "normal" mixture now that I've snaffled a pack of mixed root veg. A small cup of coffee with my main co-pilot from the days of yore (drunk over in his bung) seemed an entirely right and proper celebration. [Pause] And the next pair of copies of that biography of Geoffrey de Havilland have just turned up. That brother of mine will be paying the postage on those down to NZ in due course.
Can you deduce...
... which film was being gloriously reviewed here (by the now-late Roger Ebert)?
[It] is lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they're still explaining it during the closing titles. It's like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir. I liked it...
Movies such as this either entertain or offend audiences; there's no neutral ground. Either you're a connoisseur of melodramatic comic vulgarity, or you're not. You know who you are. I don't want to get any postcards telling me this movie
is in bad taste. I'm warning you: It is in bad taste. Bad taste elevated to the level of demented sleaze.
It was one of the first dozen or so DVDs I imported from the Land of the Free in 1998, and in 2009 I finally upgraded it to Blu-ray.
I've been struck...
... by a weirdly pleasing thought: Pitiful though they are, I do like my IBM pension payments. Since Christa died, I've picked up jolly nearly a hundred of the things.