It's caravan time! Isn't it?

A heatwave is promised for the next few days.  Even Joseph's soggy hill will have drained down enough for it to be safe to drive across the grass to Plot 9, lower field, without the car sinking like a stone dropped into a quagmire and me having to find some kind of Functioning Telecommunications* to summon Joseph and his tractor to haul it out ... (*FT there consists of climbing to the very top of the hill, perching half-standing on the stile and waving the phone around until a bar appears.)  No, I won't have to do that.

The toilet should have been installed.  I say 'should', because nothing is certain in Pembrokeshire, not even (or especially not) promises.  I'm not really fussed, to be honest.  I'm usually happy to traipse forty yards across the field to the communal block, or go over the hedge in an emergency (only of one sort, you understand).  But you have to keep up appearances in caravan sites.  I learnt that years ago when I installed my patio, on sand, in three days, as opposed to others who had spent months laying foundations and installing fancy stonework and ornate steps, and sniffed when they saw my feeble effort (which is still in place, by the way, unless it got washed away  by the snow).  (Joseph also sniffed and opined that those patios were stronger than his tractor roads up the farm.)  Also, an inside loo does attract guests.

It'll be fun to see if the fridge is still working.  Also to film, with my spanking new camcorder, the springtime behaviour of the rabbits.  And to walk the geological shore and the industrial archaeology up the valley.  (I've written before about some of that, with this label.)

I can't wait to be there, in theory.  So why am I so reluctant to go?

I will, and will report back next week.

TOM WAITS SOMEWHERE FROM WESTSIDE STORY

Profoundly Philosophical Joke

This joke was told to me by an Irishman, late in the evening in a seedy pub in Edinburgh.  For some reason, it raises all sorts of deep questions about language, Wittgenstein, the meaning of meaning: none of which I can articulate. 

A group of cavemen are sitting around their fire.  They're hungry.  Just then, the hunter comes in, carrying a strange animal that nobody has seen before. 

After they've roasted and eaten it, they fall to debating what to call this new-found creature.  All sorts of suggestions are bandied around, until the hunter loses his patience and says:

"It's called a rabbit!"

The company mutter and consider this suggestion.  Finally one of them breaks, and asks:

"So, why's it called a rabbit, then?"

The hunter raises his eyes and stares disdainfully at the questioner.

"Because it looks like a fucking rabbit!"

The Lord Of The Rings in Three Easy Pages. Page Three

And All Roads now lead to Gondor’s capital Minas Tirith, a kind of Calabrian hill town, ruled over by Denethor, father of Faramir (handsome prince) and Boromir (dead) and mad as a chopped snake.


Mordor invades Gondor (another huge battle, elephants and all, see film 3), nearly wins, but gets defeated at last gasp by Rohan cowboys and Aragorn, with his elf and dwarf, helped by some dead people. Denethor incinerates himself.

Then it all goes a bit anti-climax really, and still several hundred pages to go.  Don’t forget though that Frodo and Sam, and the faithful Gollum, are still crawling towards Mount Doom in Mordor …

‘I know!’ said Gandalf. ‘We’ll ride up to Sauron’s front door and knock and he’ll come out and then and then …’

‘I’d better lead this one,’ said Aragorn.

So they did.

But, just as Sauron’s Wraiths, Orcs, Oliphaunts, Trolls, Wild Men, etc are poised to pounce unexpectedly on Gandalf’s little army, Frodo Sam and Gollum between them manage to drop the Ring (and Gollum) into the Hot Crack of Doom – and then Sauron and all his Orcs and Trolls and Wraiths all just kind of evaporate and die and there’s lots of big hot explosions and only baddies get killed and then Frodo and Sam get rescued by an eagle (don’t ask) and then everyone gets big hugs and it’s all very very lovely with loads of archaic language, thees and thous, and ceremony and then Aragorn gets crowned King and marries his childhood sweetheart and then all the chums set off for home.

‘Hah. You’d forgotten me, hadn’t you? I’m evil wizard Saruman, and you’re not getting away with trashing my Tower and nicking all my blow. Hurry home hobbits!’

‘Oh Saruman,’ says Merry, now a full Hobbit General with feathers and bar. ‘Learn, wizard! Me and my lads can and are gonna whup yo ass.’ And so they do.

Wow, nearly half a page still to go! Right:

Sam marries Rosie and goes back to gardening.

Merry and Pippin swashbuckle around a bit, then settle down and write their memoirs. Reunion album due soon.

Gandalf wanders off somewhere, giggling.

Frodo writes his memoirs and eventually finds a publisher.

All those evil people have evaporated and died, remember, so Middle Earth’s now a nice safe comfortable boring place to live (except for that spider …!)

No-one knows what happens to the elf and dwarf.

In the end, everybody lives happily ever after, except for all the Magical People, who have to sail away to America.

THE END

Tonto 愚人

In Japan you can buy live crabs from vending machines.

The Lord Of The Rings in Three Easy Pages. Page Two

And now, all roads must lead to different places, or we run out of plot. Seven or eight heroes survive; two are sent off to Mordor, leaving call it five (cos Gandalf’s still dead). A two-three split looks good for a few more thousand pages. So.

The two junior Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, get hobbit-napped by Orcs. Did I mention Orcs? Sauron’s squaddies. Stinking stupid stunted stalinistic slobs who talk gibberish full of bad consonants and eat dried-out stale crap and drink vile toxic poisons and torture everything not like them and … Enough. You know at least one.

Strider, meanwhile, has had a humour by-pass and morphed into Aragorn. He, Gimli dwarf and Legolas elf chase the hobbit-nappers for days and days and days, but guess what - they don’t catch them! Instead they get waylaid by Vigilante Cowboys called Rohirrim, whilst the Hobbits get rescued by walking trees called Ents. [Keeping up? Hint: turn off the spellcheck.]

Gandalf comes back to life somewhere in here, got wiz-napped by Saruman but is now new White Wizard boss. Some people (and trees) go off to Isengard to beat Saruman up; others ride off to meet the King of the Rohirrim and prepare for war; Magic Balls get mobilised. Complicated strategy, heh? (there’s far worse to come) but basically, we’re stuffed, because Sauron has all the WMDs – except one!

FRODO: It’s too heavy for me, Sam me lad. All these cliffs and stuff – not to mention that scary spider. [Ed: er, point of detail, spider doesn’t actually turn up till Page Three. Author: Oliphaunt. Pukelmen. Grishnaksch. Balrog. Wanna play hardball Ed?]
SAM: I could carry it for you a bit, if you wanted, master.
FRODO: Oh no you don’t, you sneaky little squit!
GOLLUM: Perhapsss we can helpppss???
FRODO: Sounds good to me!
SAM: Hmm. Sing-song anyone? Nice bit of boiled rope?

[A note from JRRT: oh bugger what have I started here, oh flipping heck Lewis …]

I know, says Gandalf. All roads must lead to Helm’s Deep (Scotland) where there must be a Great Battle in which Rohan must confront the combined forces of Isengard and Mordor and stuff and, well, must be off, wizard biz y’know …

I know, says Gandalf again. Bring on the trees! They’ll eat the orcs and bury them and stuff and – ah, little Pippin, must cart you off so the plot can split again … And so it comes to pass. Lots of blood and thunder here. Amputations. Beheadings. Better in the film.

Aragorn goes a bit, like, strange, you know, like when the band’s breaking up, and leads his elf and dwarf off towards strange paths. Rohirrim princess fancies him, not well impressed so turns into a military man (she’s going to kill something nasty later on and marry a handsome prince, told you it was complicated …)

Sauron, meanwhile (remember Him?) has not been idle. His Wraiths are gliding around on their pterodactyls, and he’s cooked up a big yellow fog, which confounds everyone esp Gandalf. But He still hasn’t noticed that Frodo and Sam are still crawling towards those Cracks, still guided by that Gollum (will these Hobbits ever learn?) and still clutching His Big Vibrating Superpower Ring, which He still can’t find even though He made it and it’s His only chance of victory and His Orcs have actually caught Frodo and Sam redhanded with it and, oh, let’s just skip rapidly on ...

Engage tenterhooks and hang off cliffs for Page Three ...

The Lord Of The Rings in Three Easy Pages. Page One

On his eleventy-first birthday, old Hobbit Bilbo leaves his home in the Shire and wanders off to Rivendell (a kind of elf Pentagon), giving his magic ring to his young nephew Frodo. Bilbo nicked the ring, which makes you invisible, ages ago from Gollum, a slimy hissy little ex-Hobbit. For the back-story, see ‘The Hobbit’. (Don’t. It’s crap.)

Many years later, Gandalf, a very important Wizard, informs Frodo that his ring is in fact Evil Sauron’s top-of-the-range Power Tool, which gives its holder, yes, lots of Evil Power. Sauron forged this ring in the distant past, put most of His own Evil Power into it, then lost it. There are loads of other rings, all almost entirely irrelevant. Gandalf doesn’t explain why it took him so long to work all this out, nor why someone with all that Power needs to be invisible - but Frodo better split asap for somewhere safe, like Rivendell, because Sauron’s Evil Black Riders are closing in fast, on their horses, brandishing their blades and halitosis. Get scared, Hobbit!

So, months later, Frodo hits the road with his jolly chums Merry and Pippin and his faithful batman Sam. After getting into all kinds of japes and scrapes with those Evil Black Riders, Barrow-Wights, rotting vegetation etcetera, they team up with a tramp called Strider, who turns out to be a sort of Middle Earth AA man, and eventually gets them to Elf HQ. Gandalf meanwhile has been far too busy whizzing around doing wizard stuff to lend a hand till it’s near enough too late. (Also he got locked up by his old boss Saruman – bit embarrassing that, best not mention ...)

Like everyone else, I’ve left Tom Bombadil out, because he really doesn’t fit in, does he?

‘Sauron has woken up,’ said Gandalf. ‘That Ring is now too hot to handle, and gets a Capital Letter to prove it. Frodo my boy …’

‘I understand,’ said Frodo in his mythical hero voice. ‘I must take the Ring to Mordor and chuck it in the furnace whence it came forth from.’

‘You got it,’ said Elrond. ‘Your jolly chums and faithful servant can go along, also a few other lifeforms, couple of men, dwarf, elf, wizard, usual ethnic minority coverage ...’

‘I used to be the gardener,’ said Sam. ‘Now it’s all batman, servant … still, mustn’t grumble …’

‘Well said, trusty one,’ said Elrond. ‘We shall kit you out sumptuously – but no rope!’

So off they go with a skip and a jump.

There are many Journeys in this story, too many (and mostly too tedious) to recount. So we too shall skip and jump:

•  across a really tedious plain, where everyone can squabble and establish character;
•  up a malicious peak, losing out to the wrong kind of snow;
•  through the Dwarves’ mountain caverns, where Gandalf falls off a bridge and dies (for now);
•  through a mystic forest full of the creepiest, girliest elves we have yet met (though to be fair they do come up with some goodies, including rope);
•  down the muddy river in elf boats, stalked by the slimy sneaky Gollum … 

… until - just as the River, the Team Spirit and our eyelids are about to expire - there’s an almighty row, Frodo and Sam float off towards Mordor and the Cracks of Doom, and everybody else goes mad and heads away for places unknown ...

Wait with bated breath for Page Two ...

The speed of sheep

By kind permission of my brother whose masterpiece this is.

Bread-Head Bird

I had intended to have a duck for my dinner, but I couldn't catch one.  But I did find this substitute.

I've eaten him now.

NB  This is take #2 of this post, as the first try unaccountably failed to contain the picture.  Apologies for any frustration or disappointment.  Another afternoon bites the dust.

Summertime

... and the living will be easy - as long as you all remember to wind all your clocks forward by one hour, sometime very soon, otherwise your life will be hideously disrupted for the next seven months (+/-1 hour) and you'll either be late or early, depending on whether you or they forgot or remembered.  Oh what a load of fckng bllcks.  I'm off to bed after a bit of music - nearly half ten, innit?

It's all happening here!

A newsletter called 'Into Battle' from my local councillors yields the following information, which I feel should be shared with the world at large (or anywhere else) to assure you that it's not all Libya, nuclear meltdown and budgies (sorry, budgets):

• Dominos Pizza have erected new gates at the entrance to their back yard.
• The new Oxford Road car park gets very busy and is often over crowded.  The council have been asked to sort it out.
• Some people are getting into the habit of fly tipping around the Kensington Park recycling point.  Signs have been put up.
• Councillor xxxxxx was asked by a local playgroup to be Santa.  'I think the parents thought I really was Santa Claus,' he said.  'Sometimes being a politician can be fun.'
• No news on salt bins.
• 'Shocking' pictures show potholes at the bottom of Connaught Hill.  The holes have been repaired.

In other news, I have now gone 24 hours without taking any painkillers.  That's good, isn't it?

How to waste an afternoon

A little bit of my little bit of Reading today. Something's in the air ... Spring, is it?

"Honey, I'm bored"

I've been sort of thinking for some time about relocating, so it's time to investigate the options in more detail.  This place looks pretty good.  I'll have to liquidate a few assets to raise the necessary £61 million for the show apartment, plus I'll need to put a bit aside to acquire and maintain the trophy wife, but it's an avenue worth pursuing in more detail, isn't it?

Except, I wonder what it'll actually be like?  Imagine that the trophy wife and I have just been eased out of bed by the 24 hour room service, and are having a conversation about what to do today.

Me (brightly): So - breakfast on the veranda or the balcony?
TW (yawning): Same old views.  Hyde Park or Knightsbridge.  I've seen Hyde Park.  And Knightsbridge. 
Me: I know.  A movie.  In our own cinema.  We don't even have to go out, and the staff will carry us in there.
TW: We've seen all the movies.  They're crap.
Me: Well.  Um.  You could cook us lunch.  In the family kitchen.  Or pretend to.
TW (irritated): Why would I want to do that?
Me: Because ... (unable to answer this.) How about a swim?
TW: Tim, that pool's a shared facility, FFS.  We'd have to mix with the hoi polloi from those other eighty-five cheap flats downstairs.  They smell.
Me: You could check the finish on the hand-stitched leather panelling in the hall.  Again.
TW: I'd rather take a box cutter to it.  Honey, I'm bored!
I ponder for a bit while she checks her nails.
Me: We could go for a walk, I suppose.
TW: Honey, you know I hate walking.

On second thoughts, perhaps not.

Buffy Sainte-Marie - Universal Soldier

Rosie was listening to Donovan, who had a hit with this song.  Saturday evening we were listening to Buffy singing it.

Thank you, that will be ...

"Thank you, that will be fifteen pounds ninety." 
I blinked. 

We had walked across the cliffs, round Bolt Head and down to South Sands, under a cloudless sky, through the smells of coconutty flowering gorse and sweet-pungent wild garlic, often pausing to let my legs and lungs catch up, and for us to gaze down at coves that can't be reached except by sea, but were now displaying rarely seen expanses of yellow-ochre sand sloping down to shallow turquoise sea.

"It's the lowest tide of the year," announced the Tidal Bore, having consulted his iPhone.  "Plus 0.2.  Extraordinary."
"Put that thing away," said Mrs TB.

Along the way, I learnt a lot about harbour dues.  These are fees you have to pay in order to be allowed to moor or launch a vessel at a given coastal location.  This is (I think - I don't always keep up with my brother on points of detail) on top of any rental you may have paid in order to park your boat.  Fair enough - there are costs to be covered.  But I raised several eyebrows at the information that you're meant to pay harbour dues to launch a kayak.

"It's not much, only about £10 a year."
"Even so," I said.  "And, what about casual visitors, tourists who just turn up with their kayaks or whatever?"
"Hmm."

We descended to South Sands, our destination, and entered the bar of the swish new South Sands Hotel for a well-earned freshener.  My round.

"Two pints of Doombar, please," I instructed the barman.  "And a glass of red wine."
"Thank you."  He manipulated his till and smiled.  "That'll be fifteen pounds ninety, please."

I blinked.

I have now mapped out my new career path.  When the caravan season opens, in a couple of weeks' time, I will acquire a comfortable folding chair, a peaked cap, a book of cloakroom tickets and a clipboard.  I will spend my days sitting on the beach at Wisemans Bridge, and when an SUV turns up towing a jet-ski or a brace of kayaks, I will look up and smile.

"Harbour dues, please," I will say.
"Oh, er, all right.  How much?"

I will consult my clipboard.
"That will be fifteen pounds ninety, please."

Two-finger typing is back

I thought I'd celebrate the fact that I have now regained the use of my left arm, after the failed murder attempt by the mixer shower in room 34 of the Shakespeare Beach Hotel (and there's a quiz question for you: how many Shakespeare plays feature beaches?  I haven't a clue, so do please feel free to make up any answer you like), by typing some words.  And what better source than good old Chambers?  You've possibly heard some of these already, but that's not the point, which is to give me something to type.  So here goes.

'Paneity - the state of being bread.'
'Eclair - a cake long in shape but short in duration.'
'Fish - to catch or try to catch or obtain fish or anything that may be likened to a fish - such as seals, sponges, corals, compliments, information or husbands.'
'Middle-aged - between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner.'
'Sea serpent - an enormous marine animal of serpent-like form frequently seen and described by credulous sailors, imaginative landsmen and common liars.'
'Musique concrete - a kind of music, made up of odds and ends of sound variously handled.'

Censless?

I got my census form through the post yesterday.  32 pages, of which about four concern me.  So I won't have any trouble filling that in on 27 March.  Except for a few things.

Question H14 asks 'In total, how many cars are owned, or available for use, by members of this household?'  I had to think a bit, because I'd forgotten that this is meant to be a snapshot (except when it isn't), and started to try and calculate how many rental cars there are in the country.
The ones about qualifications are pretty confusing.  I've never heard of half the things, so I suppose I'm safe in assuming I haven't got them.  But the the first box asks for 1 - 4 O levels.  Yep, I can tick that.  Then box 3 says '5+ O levels'.  So that's another tick.  That makes somewhere between 6 and 9.  Or should I only tick one or the other?  It doesn't say that.  Luckily I've got a couple of weeks to clear that up - I don't want to mislead the government.
The last one, for now, is about visitors.  Normally, everyone is welcome to come and visit me, even for an overnighter.  But, if you possibly can, please try and avoid the night of 27 March, unless you want to spend the evening filling in forms.

And, at what time am I meant to fill the form in, exactly?  What if the gas central heating breaks down during the day: I'd be lying if I'd already ticked box 2 in H11.  And what if someone turns up at one minute to midnight, begging a bed for the night?

Sorry, I'm getting silly.  This often happens at this hour, especially today.

Arboreal haircuts

'Poll' is an old noun (Dutch in origin I believe) meaning 'the top of the head'.  It then became a verb meaning 'to cut one's hair'.  Next, a new noun, 'pollard', came along to signify 'a person whose hair had been cut'; this came to be mostly applied to trees rather than people; and finally, 'pollard' has turned back into another verb, which acquired its present day meaning.  Funny stuff, language.

Anyway, the trees in my avenue, which are beeches, rather than elms as those of you who know my address might imagine, are being pollarded.  It's a noisy and seemingly brutal process: a hard-hatted team, using massive chainsaws, hydraulic platforms and a frankly terrifying giant shredder, are transforming each tree from this:

To this:

This is the third time I've seen this done in the twenty-plus years I've lived here.  The first time, the Avenue was up in arms - 'they're murdering our trees' - but within a few months new shoots were appearing, and by the autumn the trees were leafy and ready to get on with what they like to do in the autumn.  Within three years they were back to their lovely leafy vibrant selves.  I don't suppose they enjoyed their haircuts much at the time, though.

There's a metaphor for life in there.

Bank Holidays

Anybody know what these are any more?  Back in the day when I was a lad, the whole country pretty well shut down except for really essential services.  Now, the only activity that stops (and that not entirely) seems to be banking.  (OK, to be fair, the poor little darlings need their rest.)  So it's a nonsense, up there with Double Summer Time and its bastard spawn, about which I've ranted enough in the past.

On the news tonight, I heard that some lunatic is proposing that the so-called May Day holiday should be moved, either to St George's Day (23 April) or Trafalgar Day (somewhere late in October).  Now this raises too many issues to discuss in full, so suffice to say that, if these pseudo-holidays mean anything at all, the October date is a no-brain shoo-in.  But there seems to be a swell of support for St George.  This is on the grounds that May Day is kind of socialist, whereas St George (a Turk who probably never existed and certainly didn't slay any dragons) and Trafalgar (the penultimate occasion on which we thoroughly trashed the French) are kind of patriotic.

But the best part is the putative justification for this rot, which is nothing to do with a holiday for us, but that apparently it will boost tourism (one of the very few remaining industries we're prepared to own up to without a shifty sideways glance), especially from China.

How, exactly?  St George's Day doesn't even get to the starting traps - it never opens the springtime bank holiday season (check it out - the latest possible Easter Sunday is 25 April); and October is not exactly high season.  But, I ask, why should it make any difference to those Chinese holidaymakers when they're mulling over possible dates for their photo-gathering trip halfway round the globe?  You can imagine the conversation over there in Beijing: 'No, best settle for October, the banks'll be shut and everything will cost twice as much.'

It's enough to make a coelacanth's blood boil.

Northern Lights

The Wires Are Alive

Earlier today I had occasion to correct a minor error concerning the provenance of the song 'My Favourite Things' .  I have in the past extolled the magnum opus that constitutes the collected works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but an exception has to be made for 'The Sound Of Music', one of the most excruciatingly maudlin squanderings of an otherwise challenging storyline in the history of the American musical.  But this isn't about that.  It's about narrow escapes.

I've had a few of these.  I forced my way onto the delayed 8.31 to Paddington, rather than wait for the following 8.42, which crashed into the misrouted commuter train at Royal Oak.  I chose the outside lane on the A303 seconds before the shunt in the middle lane that caused a fatality and a three hour tailback.  But I'm thinking of what happened, two and a half years ago, in the caravan in Pembrokeshire.

It was a filthy Sunday afternoon.  Pembrokeshire rain can be the wettest in the country.  I was depressed and tired.  Television was the only option.  So I switched it on.  It was 'The Sound Of Music'.  Oh well, I thought.  I settled down to watch, trying to be positive.  Sometime shortly after the cute kids first traipsed on like infant stormtroopers, I heard a funny crackling noise.  Funny noises happen all the time at White Park Farm, so I ignored it.  But then I realised that not only was the noise coming from the TV, so was a nasty smell, and a flume of evil-looking black smoke.  I knew what that meant.

I got the box unplugged and carted outside pretty fast, I can tell you.  I think I poured a bucket of water over it.  But here's the narrow escape.  If I'd wandered over to the toilet block for a wee, as I'd been thinking of doing, that caravan would have been incinerated by the time I returned.

The worst part was that the song they were singing, at the cringe-making concert party, when all this began, was 'The Lonely Goatherd'.  Imagine the rest of my day.

That'll teach 'em

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBfsdkGeMc8

Word games

Since we're in this neck of the words, here's a new one that's just occurred to me.  Those letter jumbles that you have to enter for Blogger word verification - awards for the best definitions.  A bit like The Meaning of Liff.

The only drawback that occurs to me is that I don't use word verification, so can't contribute any challenges.  OK, forget it.

Word Wars

I have been in a few verbal skirmishes in recent days.  So be warned: I've found a wonderful new resource called onelook.com.  This collates the content of 1,060 English dictionaries, giving about 19 million definitions.  You can do partial searches, wild cards, reverse searches, the lot.

After a very quick skim, I can report that 'kapati' and 'patrashil' do not exist as entries in any of those dictionaries.  'Jargogle' crops up three times.  (I'd assumed it was a Lallans word, but it isn't.)

All comers now welcome.  The gloves are off.

I know I said I wouldn't, but ...

... I'm in a sentimental mood, and this fell out of a browse through the '87 tapes.

Until You've Lost It

And, it's probably the best vocal performance I'll ever do.

Something's in the air

You can't hallucinate on champagne, can you?

The phone call came fairly late on Friday evening.  It was Caro.  To judge by the background noise, Saturday night's birthday party had already started.

"Do you know the words to 'When I'm Sixty-Four'?" she asked.

"Well, I know three of them," I said.

"Can you look them up, please?"  Caro can be quite authoritarian when she chooses.  "Oh, and bring your guitar.  We'll pick you up about five.  Some people want to drink while they watch the rugby."

Now, I don't really like having to sing for my supper, though I usually end up quite enjoying it.  But how can you say no to one of your dearest and oldest (well, sixty-four year old) friends?  So I got onto Google.  Rapidly establishing that the Beatles' people are avidly protective of their possessions - none of their lyrics are on any of the common legal websites - I dug out one of my several copies of 'Pepper', and typed the words into the computer.  Made half-a-dozen photocopies.  Then I picked up the guitar and made sure I could bluff my way through the chords.  The whole thing didn't take more than ninety minutes; I got to bed well before 1 a.m.

Saturday evening.  The drinks are being quaffed, the food has been eaten.  It's party time, which means, eventually, the sing-song.  Swallowing my reluctance (and my champagne), I lead the company though 'Sixty-Four' (twice) and several other songs, before announcing that my arms are now falling off and that's it, folks.

So it's time for the highspot of the evening, in honour of Cyrus, whose birthday (6) it also is.  We traipse out into the garden for what might be called sky lanterns, I'm not sure.  These are big paper wire-framed balloons which, when you light a kind of burner underneath them, float off glowing into the sky, to oohs and aahs, on a mission (someone suggested) to disrupt the air traffic control systems at Heathrow ...  But the kids loved them.

Back home about three hours later, I wandered out into the garden to look at the stars before bed.  As I was gazing up, looking for Orion, I saw what at first seemed to be a low-flying glider, without lights.  When it drew nearer, I could see that it was two of those sky lanterns.  Their fires had gone out, but they had somehow got together, still airborne, circling the night sky above Reading like ageing dancers in the dark.  I like to think they're still up there somewhere.

Moon Tune - The Last Frontier

Well, that was a lengthy, convoluted journey in order to get back to where I already was.

After an hour's faffing about trying to get rid of the patches of distortion that were irritating me, I concluded that it was actually in part these that gave it that 'big band' quality that Rosie discerned in her earlier kind comment.  So I've put it back on ACIDPlanet in its original form.

Moon Tune

Funny about the 'big band' sound.  Most of the time all you're hearing is one guitar, bass and drums.  And there's no brass apart from some horns in the intro, and the 'trombone' solo on the Yamaha synth.  Your ears can deceive you.

Moon Tune - an update

I just listened to this on ACIDPlanet, and decided it's just not good enough.  It needs a remix, which I'll do tomorrow.  I've deleted it in the meantime.

If you've already listened to it, please forget what you heard!  I'll let you know when the improved version is available.

Moon Tune

Here's the last (for now) of the 'old/new/ songs.

Moon Tune

It's been a struggle, for all sorts of reasons, and I'm not 100% happy with the sound (although a good overnight marinading in swamps of reverb does help), but I do like the song.  Hope you do too.

No more for now, because though I can hardly see the living room floor for cables and kit, I'm pretty sure it needs some TLC from the Dyson.

Technical Hitch in Blogger

I think microwave transmissions have peaked, probably due to unforeseen activity in the Middle East, or solar flares, or something, and the tipping point has been reached, provoking a global wave of temporary insanity.

I offer as evidence that yesterday evening I suddenly felt compelled, for reasons I can't remember, never mind explain, to update my Blogger template.  Why?  It was perfectly OK.  Anyway, I did it, using their wonderful new 'template designer'.  I had a look.  I wasn't sure if I liked it, so I thought I'd find some kind of undo function.

This morning I started this process.  It took most of the day, but finally I managed to get back to where I'd started, except that Sitemeter had disappeared.  Fair enough, reinstall it.  So I followed the instructions, meticulously.  They involve pasting HTML code into the appropriate place then saving the template. 

I've already bored you into submission, so suffice to say that eventually I discovered that Blogger have just introduced a new feature (old IT-speak for F-up) that, as I type, makes it impossible to save HTML.  They are silent on the subject, though hundreds of people have posted complaints.. 

I can't think of any reason at all why they'd do that, change a basic function that worked perfectly.  Or why they seem incapable of backing out the change.  Temporary mass insanity seems like the only answer.  Other examples spring to mind.

Disappointed Bride Genya Ravan AKA Patsy Cole AKA Goldie 1965

Ignore all the ill-informed comments on YouTube (except mine!) - this is Dave Anthony's Moods backing Goldie in early 1966.  Possibly the nearest thing to how the band sounded live at the time.

Moon Tune Abandoned

In my head, I had the Count Basie Orchestra.  After seventy-two hours of this song obsessing me, waking up in the night with the sound of what I hear in my head, fifteen hours of slaving over red-hot guitars, keyboards, recording machines, drum machines, I have accepted that I just can't do it.  My performance skills and my technology aren't up to it.  I could put out a partially completed job, but I wouldn't be proud of it.  So, sorry, this one ain't gonna happen.  Yet.

Just to tantalise you, here are the lyrics:

Here we are, the stars are bright
Soon be time to say goodnight, but
Just a minute, look up there -
Something's in the air ...

Stars are out, the moon is rising
They'll be singing to us soon
There's some love on the horizon -
Could this be it?

Serenading you by moonlight
To a sentimental tune
Are we ready for a goodnight kiss?
Not yet -
We still have things to do with the moon

King Pleasure Moody's Mood For Love

Sheer perfection.  You have to hum 'I'm in the Mood for Love' along with it to really get it.  I sang this in public a few times in 1965!

Synchronicity: a true story

Several years ago, we were invited next door to meet Claire's new classroom assistant, Jonny.  Claire is a music teacher and I was just getting back into making music, so there was some common ground.

The conversation got round to people's backgrounds, and Jonny mentioned that he was from Pembrokeshire.  That's interesting, I said, we've just got back from there, know it well, what part?

"Well, I'm from a little village in the south, called Amroth," said Jonny.

"Really?  Just along from Wisemans Bridge?  That's where the caravan is.  And I used to go there on family holidays as a child, fifty years ago.  We stayed in a house called Maida Vale, just up the hill from Wisemans.  The family was called Richards.  I used to play with their middle son, David."

Jonny stared at me.

"He's my uncle," he said.

The Illusionist

Great news, this film is at last out on DVD.  Amazon have been alerted, I expect my copy within a small number of days, and private showings will take place here weekly, or on demand, at least until April (alongside or alternating with Local Hero, The Princess Bride and Rio Bravo).

I bang on to everyone I can trap into being a captive audience about this wonderful movie, which I saw in a little art cinema in Manchester about six months ago.  It's based on a script bequeathed by Jacques Tati and left neglected, or suppressed, for the decades since his death in 1982, until director Sylvian Chomet managed to get the go-ahead to make it.  It's a hand-drawn animation, virtually without dialogue, created by a team of more than forty artists, telling the story of a washed-up conjuror (obviously Tati himself) who migrates to London, then Scotland, with his rabbit, in search of redemption, or just work.  I won't issue a spoiler - just to say it's about love, questioning it, and accepting that it may be time to relinquish it. 

That all makes it sound a bit sombre.  Visually, its beautiful pastels and darkening settings may reinforce this impression.  But trust me, it's hilarious - as a Tati heretic, I'd say it's funnier than anything the man himself ever did.

New old song #2

Road Song

I was going to post two songs, but can't decide which one to do next.  'Food', or 'Things to do with the Moon'?  No clues as to what they'll sound like.  Votes please.

These are awesome!

http://gprime.net/images/sidewalkchalkguy/

Larry the Cat

Larry has been recruited to the staff of 10 Downing Street after sightings of a large rat.  Presumably it was on its way to number 11.

Apricot Enemy Action

My food is either trying (misguidedly - but food isn't that bright, is it?) to liven up my life, or has it in for me.  On Sunday, it was the yogurt.  Half an hour ago, as I was attempting to extract two eggs from the fridge to be scrambled for my lunch, half a tin of apricots decided to jump out and land (upside down of course) on the floor.  This is annoying.  I'd been vaguely thinking of using those apricots to soup up the second half of the curry this evening.  And I now have to wash the freaking floor (or at least that bit of it) again.

Do you think the Big Society does minders?

Exciting Curry

Here's how to make a really eventful lamb rogan josh:

1.  Ensure you are wearing clean trousers.
2.  Follow the recipe on page 52 of Madhur Jaffrey's ' Indian Cookery (or your recipe of choice, as long as it involves yogurt).
3.  Leaving the pot on the top of the stove to come to a simmer, tidy up the kitchen. 
4.  In doing so, drop the yogurt pot on the floor, in such a manner as to ensure that the bottom 15cm (6") of your left trouser leg is thoroughly drenched in yogurt.
5.  Utter expletive of choice.  (I find a well-spiced one is best.)
6.  Run upstairs and remove trousers.  Rinse yogurt from trouser leg.  Stand there wondering whether to put trousers in washing basket or on radiator.  Decide on radiator followed by washing basket.
7.  Remember that you have left pot on stove, and dash downstairs just in time to watch it boil over.
8.  Wash kitchen floor and top of stove.
9.  Realise you are not wearing any trousers. 
10. (this step not yet achieved at the time of writing)  Sit down and drink as much gin as you can manage.

Enjoy!

A snippet of Reading

He drives down the Oxford Road most mornings at about nine, as I'm on my way to Willis and Short for the paper.  He is big, shaven head and stubble, bouncer's shoulders, arm hanging out of the open car window, festooned with tattoos.  He looks like Desperate Dan on speed, without the hat.  His stereo's always up to eleven, usually playing deep roots reggae, hissy hip-hop or Grinderman grunge.  Once, though, he'd chosen 'Touch Me In The Morning'.  Summer mornings, he stands outside his shop up the Oxford, in his white bodybuilder's vest, wishing passers-by a very good morning, with eye contact.  His vehicle of choice is a little blue Ford Ka.

I admire this man very much, because he has created a work, if not of art then at least of performance, out of mundanity.  I tend to do the opposite.  I was going to try and draw a caricature, but then luckily remembered that I can't draw.

I hate pianos

I've just listened to most of an otherwise wonderful album, 'Alegria' by Wayne Shorter, spoilt by the presence of pianos.  The horns and the bass create the chords and the counterpoint, and the drums whizz around behind the rhythm - and then the unneeded piano barges in, clunkingly, thrusting the harmony and the rhythm, which I already had, into my face.  And then, when it's time to solo, they waste whole minutes cramming in as many notes as they can, just to prove they can (because it's so much easier to plonk around on a piano than it is on a guitar or a trombone), while you go off and do the washing-up or something.  It would have been so much better without it.  Listen to the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, or Chet Baker. 

Of course, I'm not a total pianophobe.  They're fine - nay, great - in their place.  These are my top five pianists: Errol Garner (who needs a drummer?); Dave Brubeck (who needs a brass section?); Count Basie (never play two notes where one will do);  Oscar Peterson (because he's the only person who could actually bend a note on the thing); and Jerry Lee Lewis (because otherwise we wouldn't have had rock'n'roll).

And imagine, joyfully, a world without Jools Holland.

Brick Wall (my garage, 2.30 pm)

My Autobiography

I know, it looks like a solecism, but it isn't: in this case, it could legitimately be someone else's if I'd left out the word 'My'.  (A cricketer or some other sportsman published a book with that title a few years ago - that is definitely a solecism.  And I bet that's the first time the word 'solecism' has been used three times in the first paragraph of a blog post, without any of us knowing quite what it means.)

Anyway, the point is, I've completed, or abandoned, the first draft of what, in a New Year's Resolution, I jokingly called that.  It isn't, of course: if anything, it's a memoir of my early life, filtered through the element of music, and focussed on the band I eventually belonged to, Dave Anthony's Moods.

I'd like to publish this somehow, not for commercial gain or anything, just so that anyone who wants to can have a look.  But I don't know how to do that.  Anybody know how?  It's 150 pages long, so the blog isn't really an option.

In the meantime, here are the first two paragraphs:

I first became aware of my musical talent quite late on. At school, I tended to be timid (my first name, which I hated) so other boys who weren’t so timid or shy took the lead. Although I had heard, loved, and even listened to music since my ears opened (my father singing me to sleep with ‘A Long Way to Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ and ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’; I think those songs will be my last memory traces to erase themselves), the idea that boys like us could actually do it ourselves never occurred to me, until we heard Lonnie Donegan, Johnnie Duncan and the Blue Grass Boys, the Vipers, Nancy Whiskey. Mike Caddy, Tony Barney and Pete Jennions were those leading, unshy boys who naturally formed skiffle groups. I was given the washboard, and begged my mother for thimbles (the washboard itself acquired from a long gone ironmongers in Southbourne Grove). But that’s getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back.

Let’s imagine Bournemouth in the post-war years, before the end of rationing. We lived in Southbourne. From the cliffs, the vista was defined by Hengistbury Head, then the distant Isle of Wight (the Polar Bear) to the left, Old Harry Rocks with the lights of Swanage beyond, on a clear night, twenty miles to the right, and in between, the vast expanse of blue or grey or silver sea, and the endless horizon. The cliffs, the beach with its alarmingly seasonal changes of sand levels, the tarmac prom, the barnacle-crusted seaweed-tangled breakwaters, the green paint-flaking beach-hut, the icy finger-whitening water – this was where I felt best. Once the barbed wire had been cleared from the beach (placed there just in case Hitler decided that Bournemouth was going to be one of his Normandy beaches; both piers were blown up for similar reasons: we weren’t going to let him dock his pleasure-boats here either, were we?), the family beach-hut was quickly salvaged, painted and reinstated by my energetic father, who had doubtless learned this principle of continual recovery, repair and restitution from his years in the Merchant Navy between the wars. I can’t be precise about the dates of ‘Tipperary’ and ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’. My father was away for most of the war, in Malvern and other places, on important scientific business which the family believed to have been to do with the development of radar, though he never talked about it, having presumably signed the Official Secrets Act. Come to think of it, he never talked about anything much until his very late years, preferring to retreat to his workshop, where he mended things, did obscure works of electronics, and crafted exquisite pieces of woodwork and furniture. But on home visits, he sang me to sleep with these songs, I think, before I could walk properly. There were others – ‘Waltzing Matilda’, ‘My Darling Clementine’, even Leadbelly’s ‘Good Night Irene’ – these melodies and lyrical stories plunged into my psyche at a very early age. I remember his pride in me when he came back on a visit and I had mastered the use of a wheelbarrow (I was four); at six, I helped him shift the sand from the road to the back garden when he single-handedly built the new garage at the side of 37 (which still stands). But after he came home for good, he never sang to me again.

A bit of joke philosophy for you

I've been told to write nonsense, so here's some. 

Solipsism is the belief that everything exists only in your imagination.  The phrase 'extreme subjective idealism' has been used.  Now, if I subscribe to this view, it follows that you're not actually there reading this (which may well be true judging by the number of visits I get to this blog).  But you'll be thinking the same thing about me. 

It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really hold up.  Why would I go to all that trouble?

So, here's the joke.  A conference of solipsists is presented with the following agenda item: 'Discuss.'

New old song #1

"Carry Me Away"

Turn the volume up!  The crappy MP3 format which acidplanet now imposes isn't a patch on the wma.

I'm not especially proud of this, but it had to be done.

Sweet dreams ...

Last night, I crawled up to bed about 11.30.  I only make my bed when I need it, and I was about to do so when I saw this ogre leering up at me from the pillow.

It's OK.  I gave him a good punching and he let me sleep like a baby.

Visibility Cloak

It says here that scientists at the University of Birmingham have invented a sort of prism, made out of something called calcite, which when placed in front of a small object, such as a paperclip, renders it invisible.  Calcite is itself transparent (and visible) but has the property of somehow bending light so that whatever is behind it, under very restrictive controlled conditions, can't be seen in the human visible light spectrum.

I foresee a few difficulties.  For a start, if what's behind the calcite prism can't be seen, how do they know it's transparent?  More importantly, even if the technology can be developed to encompass much larger objects than paperclips, the fact that the calcite itself is visible is a bit of a giveaway, isn't it?  I mean, if you see a big lump of what presumably looks like glass walking around, once you know about this stuff you're going to think 'mm, that's a person', aren't you?  And if a spy plane sees a big sheet of glass in the desert, with apparently nothing behind it, it's a strong clue.  Probably a uranium enrichment plant.

No, I can't see this one catching on.  I'll continue to disguise my uranium enrichment plant as a disused compost bin - which is itself disguised as a toasted Dalek.

Egyptians are walking!

Darling buds of January

Look!

You can't actually see them, because they're invisible to the naked lens, but trust me, those are definitely buds on the apple tree.  I hope they don't regret it - the early cold spell may have fooled them into thinking it's really the start of spring.  When I say 'thinking', of course, trees don't actually think.

There's a new white van in the Close.

Well, not new in any real sense.  It's been there since before Christmas, and is falling apart with rust and flat tyres.  The police say they can't do anything about it till someone moves it, which obviously isn't going to happen.  So we'll have to wait for the tax to expire at the end of March.  It's not even as interesting as the previous mystery van, which at least had bursts of activity to liven things up.  This one just sits there and decays.

I'm trying to finish the first 'new old song', 'Carry Me Away'.  I can hardly sit down for guitars, amps, drum machines, cryptic scribbles in notebooks.

It will get finished, though, quite soon.

I know, I'm rambling.  That's because I'M BORED!  Being bored consists of wanting to do something but not having you want to do.

First car

I don't know why, but I fell to thinking about this on my way to the bottle bank this morning.  It was a Morris Minor, 850cc side valve model, did 0-60 in about four minutes.  Semaphor indicators, nice red leather upholstery, the back seat as comfortable as the front (don't ask).  Strictly speaking, it was my mother's, not mine: on my earnings of £10/10/- a week, after meeting my needs - beer, cigarettes, records - I couldn't be expected to finance transport as well, could I?  (Though I did have to put petrol in.)

I reached the bottle bank, and as I started to offload another hundred quid's worth of green glass, what should pull in behind me but, yes, you guessed it.  It wasn't a dead ringer - red rather than beige, the souped-up 1000cc OHV version - but I wasn't complaining.  I congratulated the owner, who was, he told me, eighty-five.  This was his fourth or fifth Minor, he thought; he bought them cheap, had them restored and kept them for a few years, then sold them at a modest profit.  'Wonderful machine,' I suggested, not quite meaning it.  'Yes,' he said.  'It's my life, really.'

For some reason, I felt old and young at the same time.

Word collection ('most useless' category)

My trusty friend Chambers just offered me the following:

'Haplography: the inadvertent writing once of what should have been written twice.'

Eh?

OK, I suppose I could have written 'ofered' and writen'.  Or how about 'betrot'?  But has this haplography word ever actualy ben used?  Especialy now we have spelcheck?

Language is very very strange, init?

haiku

How easy it is
to listen to sad music
as the spring begins

I can't draw

 But I used to try, once upon a time.

It must be true, I read it in my diary

I'd intended to waste the afternoon, but the new diary kept flapping its pages at me.  So I took on the annual task of transcribing the birthdays of relatives and friends from 2010 to 2011.  Thankfully, this time none of them had to be converted from red to black (this happens when someone has died during the year).

It's not a very exciting task, to be honest, so it's easy to get distracted.  The diaries I use (yes, they still take the form of hardback paper-based books, rather than any of this new-fangled technology) contain a little homily, squib or trivial pursuit for each day of the year.  Last year, it was 'trivia Q&A', the As being printed upside down below the Qs, just to make it hard for you.  Here are a couple, plucked at random from the mists of time:  'how many dominoes in a standard set?' and 'which temperature has the same value in centigrade and Fahrenheit?'  No, I'm not going to tell you.

This year, it seems to be 'little-known facts'.  I think I'd put 'facts' in 'quotes', because the entry for Thursday 27 January asserts that 'you are slightly taller in the morning than in the evening due to gravity'.  Hmm.

I know that a few scientifically-orientated people occasionally read this blog, so I'm tempted to hand this one over to them.  But I can't help speculating.  Assuming that the diary is assuming that I spend the night lying down and the day standing up (dubious territory, this), how do they know what whatever measuring instrument was used to conduct the experiment has been up to during the night, or day?  Eh?  Naturally, Collins diaries don't cite sources or peer review data, and I can't be arsed to google it.  But I do remember somebody drunkenly asserting something similar at a dinner party some months ago, and me patiently explaining that the effects of Special Relativity only apply at near-light velocities, and by definition can't be measured, at least according to quantum mechanics ...

Anybody want another diary date?

Good news

Yesterday, 17th January, was officially the most depressing day of the year, measured by suicide attempts, marital disputes or, presumably, Dave Cameron's new happiness index about which I wrote a few weeks ago.  Isn't that great news?  From now on, it can only get better.

To prove it, the sun has just come out, for the first time in a fortnight.

Stuff

I'd started to read a novel by Anne Tyler which begins with a man, about my age, who has decided to downsize and so gets rid of a lot of his possessions (she makes it sound rather easy), when the doorbell rang.  It was an antiques dealer from Brighton, enquiring whether I had anything for sale.  I don't normally respond to that kind of approach (must get one of those 'don't buy, don't sell' stickers), but I remembered this guy from a few years ago.  I explained that I really couldn't help him, and he accepted this and was about to leave, but glanced through the door and said 'I know you're not selling, but can I just have a peek at that George III oak breakfast table?'  That's the one in the hall which carries the phone, the router and the junk mail.  'Hmm, needs restoring, but ... three grand?'

Half an hour later, after some fascinating insights into some of my furniture and other items not for sale (and some startling valuations), he left his card and departed empty-handed.  A charming person, and completely genuine.  But it got me thinking: sooner or later, one way or another, I'm going to leave this house.  Whichever way, it'll be a downsize.  And someone, hopefully me but potentially whatever poor sod I appoint to clear up after me, is going to have to sort this lot out.  Never mind what I can see, just wandering from room to room, there's the workshop, the study, the garage, the loft ... just the loft alone contains enough antique hi-fi to start up a science museum ...  I ought to make a start.

Later on, I needed to check on the spelling of some Italian words (shop names, as it happens) for my so-called autobiography.  I knew I had a little Italian dictionary somewhere, and eventually found it, in a box full of old travel brochures which would certainly have gone without a thought into that skip of the discarded past.  I know that everyone's past eventually gets discarded, but ...

This afternoon, the doorbell rang again.  It was a lady who lives down the road but would quite like to move up to the posh end, to be nearer her daughter who's five doors up from me.  So, she said, I thought I'd be cheeky and ask everyone whether they were thinking about moving - especially, she said, this lovely house.  I was tempted to say make me an offer, contents included.  But I didn't.

Roll on the spring, when I can get down to the caravan, where everything is here and now and it's all good stuff.

Undercooked shark steak

I haven't had a good rant for ages, and I feel the need for one, so it may as well be about banks.  And government.  And everything in between.

Bob Diamond, the newly appointed boss of Barclays, was hauled over the coals of a Commons select committee this morning, to be grilled on the hot topic of 'bankers' bonuses'.  Of course, the coals were lukewarm, and he didn't even get lightly char-broiled.  His people had, as one's people do, thoroughly prepared him for the inevitable questions from the viciously aggressive prawns of the committee, so he was able to say, with an apparently straight face, that there has been a period of 'remorse and apology' from the banks (WHAT??) but now we need to achieve closure and move on, and blah blah; and that he can't say whether or not he'll be renouncing his bonus this year because he hasn't yet been told how much it is (is that relevant?) and anyway he'll have to ask the wife (I'm not making any of this up); and, most barefacedly blatantly, that the invaluable contribution of the investment banking industry to the UK economy mustn't be overlooked and must be rewarded.

He was filmed afterwards leaving the committee venue, smiling coyly, as well he might. 

Why hasn't anyone (except me, but I don't count) suggested that these bonuses be in some way tied to what the beneficiaries claim to have done to earn them?  By that, I don't just mean how much so-called money they appear to have made, but how they did it.  Make the recipient justify it.  Reward good core activities like responsible lending, payment services - all the things we used to rely on banks to do - but don't, don't reward the kind of bubble-blowing that got us into this mess in the first place and seems poised to do it again.

But then, I'm just a shrimp amongst a sea full of raw prawns.  We don't stand a chance against the sharks, especially when we don't know how to cook them.

More Music

New Year Resolution #5.  So, the easy bit first: music I've already made and recorded.  In this case, just two more songs from the 87 tapes - no more of those will be published, because they're not good enough.  These two, though, I think are.

Hopelessly Lost



Local Girls

The next phases will be:

• More recent recordings, from 2003 or thereabouts (maybe - they were made for a musical which I've abandoned for now, and I'm not sure they stand up on their own.  I'll check them out.)
• Songs written in the past but not yet recorded.  (This requires an element of drudgery, but I think there are a few worth preserving, maybe 3 or 4 out of about 200)
• Songs not yet written.  This will require creativity, collaboration, hard work, and above all fun.

Hex

Rosie suggested a hex might be one way of fixing her inconsiderate neighbours, so I immediately dived for Chambers dictionary, as I do whenever a word catches my eye.  There are apparently three different meanings, and putting them together I deduce that we're talking about a hexadecimal bringing of misfortune, by a witch, using uranium hexafluoride.  Is that about right?

The preceding word in the dictionary, by the way, is 'hewgh', which means 'imitating the whistling of an arrow', at least according to Shakespeare.  The subsequent one is 'hey'.  Why am I so enthralled by this stuff?

White van

The original white van is back after twelve months' absence.  It'll be there until March now.  Oh dear, this is an omen of some kind.  Tomorrow the bicycle will appear, chained to the lamppost opposite, and I'll know I'm stuck in some kind of Groundhog Year as well as the usual Day.

Christmas Card Audit 2010

Snow/Snowmen/Snowflakes:                          12
Christmas trees/Baubles:                                  9
Santas/Reindeer:                                              8
Animals/Birds:                                                 7
(of which Robins:                                             2)
Nativities/Wise Men/Angels:                           5
Comical:                                                           4
Twelve Days:                                                   2

Special categories:
Homemade (not including photos):            4
Cards with glued-on glitter:                       9
ecards/email:                                             4
Wonderfully weird:                                   4 (try harder next year please)

And finally, the Awards:

Best Nativity: Madonna Of The Village, by Marc Chagall
Best Santa: Santa is sitting on the Moon, holding a fishing line with a star on the end.  I think it's meant to mean "When You Fish Upon A Star", but I may be wrong.

BEST CARD: as is often the case, goes to my dear friend Moll, for this (enlarge to appreciate):

                                              Copyright Mollie Hall.  Reproduced by permission.

New Year Resolutions

I wonder how many blog posts are being composed at this moment, across the universe, with this title.  I'd bet on millions.  And of course the corny question, how many of those resolutions will be kept?  The whole notion is nutty, of course.  It's just another date, insignificant in every real sense.  Just a convenient way of keeping track and agreeing appointments.   The so-called New Year occurs all over the place - see here - and the one we celebrate, January the first in the Gregorian calendar, is completely arbitrary.  If anything, here in the northern hemisphere it should be the Winter solstice, when the days start to light up. If it was down to me, I'd go for the Spring equinox, time of renewal and rebirth.

Anyway, time's running out, so I need to make my resolutions.  I've whittled my shortlist of about eighteen down to five.  The baseline rule being that these shouldn't be things you kick into tomorrow and then fail at by the Chinese New Year, but resolutions - things you resolve - to be achieved by this time next year.  Here they are.

Live less in the past and the future.
Break a few useless habits, like sleeping when not tired.
Stop saying 'Actually' and 'Of course' so much.
Finish and publish (somehow) my (partial) autobiography.
Make more music.

Check me out.  Toots Hibbert has just come on.  Have to go.  Happy New Resolutions.

Penultimate Post

No no, not penultimate ever, just of this year; or should it be of this decade?  Eleven years ago there was a debate, as if it mattered, over whether a decade commenced with the year numbered zero or the one numbered one.  If I ask you to count up to ten, I'll bet you'll start at 1, not 0.  So it's arguable that the noughties are about to end, rather than having done so twelve months ago.  Do I care?

No, but it's got me through to 8.43.  Only another 197 minutes to go, minus the three it took me to do that calculation and type this sentence.  Time-filling project going well so far.  Next?

The phone rang at about 2.30 this afternoon.  I should explain that I've recently become the co-co-ordinator of the local Neighbourhood Watch, a role which seems to consist of forwarding messages from the police about local crime, organising six-monthly meetings and the odd social gathering (next one 16th January, mulled wine to be project-managed), and being unaccountably popular for doing all that.  Anyway, the phone call was from A down the road, who'd noticed that a suitcase had been dumped in the Close, next to a white van which had been parked there for a couple of weeks and had a flat tyre, and should the police be notified?  I gently pointed out that they might be a bit busy today, but I would monitor the suitcase.

How're we doing?  9.07.  Not bad.  Just checked - the suitcase hasn't moved.  Yet.

3.30, the phone rings again.  It's C from next door.  She's having lunch in town with a friend, but has just spoken to her frail 91 year old dad, H, who lives with her, and it seems he has a bit of a problem.  I find the keys and dash round.  H has fallen out of his chair, trying to get up to retrieve his stick, which he's left in the next room, and is crouched down facing the chair, unable to move.  I try to haul him up, but he's too heavy.  "Keep still, keep calm," I tell him.  He grins up at me.  "Yes, that sounds like a good idea,"  he says.  He's not in pain, just distressed: as much by his own stupidity as anything, I think.  The amazing paramedic arrives within ten minutes of the 999 call, during which time H has managed, with my help, to get himself back up into a seated position.  Paramedic embarks on an exhaustive series of questions, examinations, tests.  C has got back home by now.  H seems to be fine; I decline the inevitable cup of tea (I think I need a drink) and head back next door.  [At this point, I'd like to pay tribute, not for the first time, to our fantastic emergency services, and pray that this skinflint government doesn't manage to completely fuck them up.]

Unusual day so far, no?  (And I haven't mentioned the morning, also unusual but private.)

Wow, 9.27, doesn't time fly?  And I know my watch is 5 seconds fast, so there's a saving.

Well, actually, that's about it, except for my dinner, which was, for the occasion, haggis, tatties'n'neeps, washed down with my patent onion gravy and a dusty bottle of Cote Rotie I found lurking at the bottom of the wine rack.  (Bottle not yet drained, I hasten to add, it's only 9.33 for goodness sake.)  The haggis was interesting.  Stop yawning please.  I couldn't get a whole one (sold out, just as well, I'd never have finished it) so settled for two microwaveable vacuum-packed slices - genuine Macsween - which were delectable.  As you know, I'm a connoisseur (there's another 45 seconds gone looking up the correct spelling of that word) of comical food labelling, so I'll share this one: "Be careful removing pack from the microwave, as it will be hot."

9.54.  So little time, so much to do.  I still have another blog, about resolutions, to write, and Jules Holland starts at eleven, with Kylie, Wanda Jackson, Toots of the Maytals, Captain Beefheart (only joking about the last) ...  Later.

Somewhere?

Scrabbling around

Rosie recently accused me of being a talking crossword.  I have no idea what that means, but I think she must be right, because my brain (or whatever it is) immediately came up with 'Angry chat puzzle? (7, 9)' - which of course means absolutely nothing either as a clue or a solution.  But I can't stop playing with the words and their letters.  I realised just the other day that my surname is actually Elgar.

I've just wasted an hour trying to find an anagram for Happy New Year, or variants thereof, but I can't.  So, in clear:

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

Cookathon

I'm not normally one to brag in public (in private, to myself, that's another thing), but this is special.  So let it be known that today I prepared the following:

A batch of celeriac and leek soup, to be frozen for Boxing Day;
A chicken and lentil curry (murghi aur masoor dal), also for Boxing Day;
A cauldron of minestrone containing seven vegetables (eight if you count the bay leaf);
A batch of ragu al bolognese;
A wholemeal loaf.
Oh, and a gin and tonic.

Look on my works and despair!

Only trouble is, I'm not really hungry now.  Think I'll just make an omelette.

Margaret's Pies

A few minutes ago, as I was sitting here contemplating a pre-prandial dry oloroso, I heard what sounded like a high-pitched road drill out in the back garden.  Has some child received an early present, I wondered? and do they do junior pneumatic drills now?  It wouldn't surprise me.

I went out to investigate.  It was a gang of magpies having a conference, or a war, hard to tell which as I don't speak magpie fluently, in my leafless copper beech.  There must be some tasty carrion somewhere nearby.  The local red kite flew over, glanced down and wisely decided to keep going.  The other birds were keeping their heads down.

Just for fun, I clapped my hands.  The magpies must have experienced gunfire or something in the past, because they all scooted off to the next-door-but-one's leylandiia.  I counted them out: there were seven.  So somewhere out there, there's a secret that can never be told.

Deep and crisp and uneven

I know some people claim to like the stuff, to find it arousing or stimulating or pretty or whatever, but probably they haven't spent the day watching it pile up at an inch an hour while they wonder where the wellies are and when would be a good time to trudge out and haul some coal in, and how many sausages there are in the freezer and whether the corner shop will have any potatoes left that haven't gone mouldy by the time the pavements have become passable, possibly next Wednesday, whilst also wondering whether the folks flying over from Jersey have made it, and if so where they are now; and whether you're glad or not the party's been cancelled, glad because it was always going to be a bit of a trial, not glad because of so much wasted effort and disappointment ...  and how to replan the next seven days, on the assumption, from a position of practical pessimism, that motorised transport can't be counted on, in order to deliver the expectations - yours, but more importantly others - that wrapped and labelled gifts (leaving aside the ones that were meant to be handed to the Jersey folks before they set off, tomorrow morning, to Sri Lanka, from a snowbound Heathrow), soup, rolls and curry for Boxing Day (none of which have been made yet) and onesself (clean and black-tied) will turn up, on time, for champagne and canapes on Christmas Day in the morning.

Let it snow?  Bah, humbug.

Lucky horseshoe

Here's how to get an adrenalin kick.

I came back from my usual Monday overnighter at Datchet, parked up, walked round to the front, opened the door, defused the burglar alarm, closed the door, dumped the bag on the stairs, opened it and pulled out slippers and newspaper; so far, so routine.  Then I remembered I needed to nip up to Waitrose for a few things.  Shoes still on, luckily.  Out through back door, down the garden to the car, up the Oxford Road, whizz round Waitrose, back home, job done.  You're bored enough, so let's skip over the rest of Tuesday and jump to Wednesday morning, today.

Today is the day when the Christmas Shopping Death-Eater is going to be vanquished, or at least severely disabled.  So I'm all geared up, sluiced and breakfasted, list in pocket and ready to roll by nine o'clock.  But, the shops and car parks of Reading Town mostly aren't open yet, so there's time to nip down the shop for the paper, as usual. 

I'm paranoid about leaving the house without my keys, ever since I did it once.  So I check my pocket.  They're not there.  I check everywhere I could have left them around the house.  Not there. 

It's funny how the most irrelevant thoughts flash through your mind at such moments.  What I felt, first, was sadness.  I've had that little silver horseshoe on my key-ring since I was eighteen.  I must have stupidly left the keys in the front door when I got home on Tuesday morning; they're stolen; and now I've lost my oldest possession.  I felt sad.

That didn't last long, of course.  Rational logical practical Tim took over pretty quick.  My house is now in danger of intrusion.  OK, sort it out.  Check details of Chubb front door lock.  Bolt front door from inside.  Exit via back door (key luckily not on lost ring).  Up to Homebase (car key also luckily not on lost ring).  Buy replacement lock. Back home.  Install new lock ...  Forget about Christmas shopping surge for today, probably. 

So that's what I do.  Except that I don't get past step three.  Because as I walk across the lawn towards the car, something glints up at me from the grass ...

That's when the adrenalin kicked in.

Scottish Play

Unexpected evening.  After engulfing my spag bol, the plan was to settle down to Antiques Roadshow and then Inspector George Gently, a gentle Sunday night of mindless telly.  Instead, I somehow found myself watching, on the great BBC4 channel, this riveting political drama/supernatural thriller/demented-late-Pam's-dream-sequence-episode of Dallas.  Two hours later, I glanced back at the original text of Macbeth, hoping (after having seen this thing, now, four times), to work out what the flip was going on.

I still haven't a clue.  But I can report the following: they're all mad.  But they each become madder and saner in turn, swirling around and missing each other's madness and sanity in one of those dances where nobody actually touches, until they all, accidentally or deliberately (nobody's sure which), get killed or emotionally maimed - including, especially, the guy who comes out on top.

Fun evening.  Everybody who believes they know anything and can do something about it should have watched.

Anonymous comment

I get these from time to time.  They never appear under the actual post, just in email notifications.  Usually, I ignore and delete, assuming them to be some weird kind of spam.  But this one caught my eye.

"I be enduring be familiar with a few of the articles on your website in the present circumstances, and I unqualifiedly like your tastefulness of blogging. I added it to my favorites net age muster and last will and testament be checking assist soon. Will report register in view my position as highly and leave to me be familiar with what you think. Thanks."

What do you think?  A computerised translation from a dying language?  A lost work by Ezra Pound?  A coded message from a drunken ambassador?  Whatever, it has a certain surrealistic poetry, so if you're out there, Anonymous, thanks too - I'm not taking the piss, just being entertained.  Giggling, actually.

Safe Christmas.

Finally, in this unprecedented flurry of news-derived blogposts:

Today's Guardian has a two-page feature, under 'Health', full of sound, sensible, stodgy advice on how to avoid injury, stress, accidents, divorce etc. over the festive period.  The following caught my eye:

'Don't leave food that's cooking unattended in the kitchen, and don't cook when you're drunk...'

How does that work, then?

Shark attacks

Well, now we know why they call it the Red Sea.  Interestingly, the word I've seen used over and again by shark experts in reference to these incidents is 'unprecedented'.  Personally I'd have thought that five in three days set pretty much of a precedent, but let that pass.  The best bit was on the TV news the other day, where a British woman said it wasn't going to stop her going in the water.  'You can't let it spoil your holiday, can you?' she said.

Naughtie Auntie!

Just in case you didn't know, on the Today programme on Monday morning, just before the 8 o'clock news, Jim Naughtie accidentally (we assume) replaced the first letter of culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's surname with a C.  Sadly, I wasn't up in time to hear it, but Jim was apparently torn between spluttering apology and choked-off hilarity, blaming it afterwards on 'Dr Spooner'.  It wasn't, of course, a Spoonerism (or Snooperism as by friend Bill used to call it), which is something of the order of 'riding around in roaring pain on a well-boiled icicle'; he would have had to have said 'Heremy Junt', which wouldn't have been funny.

But it gave the Guardian the opportunity, which they gleefully took in today's edition, to print the word in question, unasterisked, twelve (12) times by my count, surely a record.  I must nip out and buy the Mail and Express to see how they got on.

Another one from 87

Upstairs this afternoon, ironing shirts, I looked out of the window at the remnants of the snow, and remembered this.  It - the song - says all there is to know about where I was at when I wrote it in 1985,  as my marriage was disintegrating into painful shards.  I sat there in my house in Harrow, staring out of the dark window, and wrote it down, more or less in real time, as it happened.

By two years later, when I came to record it on my little Fostex 4 track and my Roland drum machine, all that angry emotion had been flushed away, and I could have some fun.   It's the most enjoyable recording I've ever done (until very recently).

Drifting into Danger