2016 — 27 July: Wednesday
There's a tad of drizzle this morning.1 But the tea is hot, the pre-breakfast biscuit is crunchy, and the morning music is deliciously jaunty. Can that nice Mr Trump say the same, I (don't) wonder?
Given the effect...
... of all that generous central bank "quantitative easing" since the 2007/8 financial "crisis" it occurs to me that I've been enjoying almost all the dubious benefits of negative interest rates on my "savings" for eight years already. In fact, I actually saw QE described as "the printing of electronic money" for the first time just this week. Rare honesty.
I see no reason to deviate from my current adherence to the Micawber principle in the genteel poverty of my retirement — besides, my generous State Pension is supposed to kick in on my 65th birthday. News that one NHS consultant in Lancashire managed to be paid £350K in overtime last year leaves me curiously unmoved. Our Lords & Masters have always been skilled at flinging public money around, quite often into the Black Hole of a doomed computing project. The NHS is simply a larger Black Hole than many others.
The ghastly Trump...
... is claimed to have been predicted by Rousseau. Nice essay:
Not so sure about the mix of fonts.
From North of the border...
... some pleasing commonsense:
To end up in a position, which is highly possible, where we have to abide by all the rules of the single market and pay to be part of it, but have no say whatsoever in what the rules are, would not be taking back control, to coin a phrase we've heard more than once recently — it would be giving up control.
Tee-hee!
Classy lady, with a telling parallel:
Walk walked...
... lunch made and lunched, laundry laundered and now drying, online news browsed (and found massively wanting), choral evensong dodged, fresh blackcurrants washed, enhanced by judicious addition of cranberries and three plums, and awaiting some serious stewing later today.
Time, therefore, to resume Kodification of TV material.
Several hours and an evening meal later, I was just Kodifying GF Newman's 1978 "Law and Order", about which I wrote...
- This is not the long-running American TV series, but the 4-part BBC series written by GF Newman and transmitted 30 years ago this month. It examines endemic judicial corruption from the perspectives of the police, the criminal, the solicitor, and the prisoner. This stunning series made the same impact on us when we saw it as Edge of Darkness did seven years later.
I'm not terribly surprised today to learn that it "upset the establishment to the extent that the BBC Director General was summoned to the Home Office and told that it should not be repeated nor sold abroad. Apart from screenings at the National Film Theatre, this was the case for 30 years until the programme was finally released on DVD". I bought my copy as soon as it became available.