Dancing? Help!

I'm going to a wedding in February.  The invite instructs me to name 'two songs you love to dance to'.  I've come up with 'Roadrunner' by Jonathan Richman, and 'There Must Be An Angel' by Eurythmics.  I know that none of my readers are invited to the wedding, but it'd be fun to get your suggestions anyway, and they can be stored up for future reference.  Dave's ideas would be especially welcome.

Grandma

This is my father’s mother.  She was a figure of awe in my family, until she died at the age of ninety in 1960, when I was eighteen.  She was called Emmeline, a good Victorian name that has been carried forward in the family to my niece (whose fortieth I will be celebrating in a few weeks’ time, as it happens, but who is not at all Victorian).

Grandma was Victorian, and suitably formidable.  Her maiden surname is also my middle name, and I firmly believe (without a shred of evidence) that this naming protocol, which continues down the generations on the male side, may have been one of the conditions of my parents being permitted to marry.  The surname is still eminent in Jersey. 

Her husband, my grandfather, although born in the same year, 1870, died in the thirties, so I know nothing of him apart from a couple of old photos.  She was evacuated to England before the invasion of Jersey, and I think she spent much of the rest of her life being shuttled between various relatives.  She was one of numerous siblings, which I guess is how the family fortune got dissipated.  Certainly there was an uncle who absconded to the Argentine and lost a bundle on ill-advised railway investments.

Of course, I was too young to know any of this background firsthand, so I’m doing a certain amount of reconstruction here.  It’s a fact to be pondered that the historical record inevitably gets diluted, even for famous people, never mind the likes of us; and there are probably now only four people alive who have direct memories of Grandma.

She’d come to stay with us for some weeks during each summer, in the fifties.  This was a cause for domestic repositioning in our household.  My mother was stressed out for weeks beforehand.  And Grandma played to her strengths, more or less reordering things in her own image.  She was pretty good at that.  A friend of mine makes great play (in a knowing self-referential way) of the ‘controlling female’ stereotype – she should have asked my grandmother for a few tips.

And yet, I remember her as mostly kind and wry.  If you saw the photos, you’d see that in her face.  Every late afternoon, she would retire for a while to her room; I later learned that this was for her gin.  She once criticised me for using too much toilet paper, making some joke about rationing.  And one year, it must have been about 1953, we kids had been allowed, on a hot summer day, to play in the garden with the hose.  This had to be stopped before Grandma came, but the evidence can’t have been fully concealed, because when she arrived she enquired what had been going on and elicited a confession.  I can hear her now, in her rich Victorian voice.  “Oh, don’t be silly, it’s very hot.  Of course they can play with the hose.  I almost wish I could join them.”

Thanks to my sister for details; more memories please!

And thanks to Z for sowing the seed.

Caravan diaries: end of term report

Not much to report really.  Everything drained and shut down for the winter.  Very cleverly, I managed to use the last drop of water from the tank when shaving this morning, which saved some crawling around underneath the van.

The robin came in to say hello again yesterday afternoon.  Unfortunately, this time he left a calling card - well, more than one actually.  Luckily, for some reason I had some Vanish Carpet and Upholstery Ultimate Stain Remover, which got lavishly applied.  I read the list of ingredients: anyone know the difference between Anionic Surfactants and Non-Ionic Surfactants?  I only ask.

Halfway back up the M4, I thought I'd left some milk in the fridge.  That might not have been nice by next Easter.  As it turned, I hadn't, it was there in the coldbox when I got home.  It was just that I couldn't remember having taken it out of the fridge.  Is there such a thing as a false non-memory?

I have promised myself to get down there more often next season.  The flush toilet will definitely be installed by then, which hopefully will encourage visitors (of the non-avian sort).

GV progress report

The grapes had to be picked and processed today, for three reasons: one, risk of frost; two, some turning into raisins; and three, avian invasions.  Here they are.

The ripe ones were stripped off the stalks, and 43 ladybirds (I counted them out, you can see the first one) returned to the wild, mostly back onto the vine.  I hope they're grapeful.  Plenty of grapes were left for the birdies.

Further ingredients then had to be added:

... and here is the progress so far:

The label on the sweet jar is, of course, designed to deter any burglars who might otherwise have been tempted.  And the glass of wine is, of course, totally irrelevant.

Next update somewhere around December 17th.

I am not making this up

Last Monday I decided to cook some BlackBerries with my Apples, for breakfast.  I suspect I'm not the only one.  The Law of Unintended Consequences...

Speed

My neighbour, whom I’ll call John, is pretty slow now, physically.  It took ten minutes to get him from his chair to the car, one step at a time, supported by his stick in one hand and my arm in the other.  He has his techniques for these familiar manoeuvres, though – stick in left hand descending the steps whilst gripping the rail with his right; get bum onto car seat first, stow the stick away and, if necessary, call for assistance in getting legs in and clear of the car door, and so forth – John is ninety-one in his body but, thank goodness, still in his seventies in his mind.

The reception girls at the dentists’, when we got there, rallied round to get him into play.  One of them said to me afterwards that this was what she liked best about the job – “Well, it’s a bit of fresh air, isn’t it?”, but I think it went deeper than that for her.  As we were getting him out of the car, he glanced down.  “Oh my goodness, I’ve come out in my slippers!”  He grinned impishly, seeing a way through the pain.  “Do you think I should go back and change?”

Eventually, when he was installed in the chair, the diagnosis was as expected: an incipient abscess behind the right canine.  I took notes about the details of the treatment and prognosis (antibiotics followed by a further consultation in a week, basically), to be passed on to his daughter (call her Barbara), whose emergency  call at 8 a.m. had got me involved in the first place, and we loaded John back into the car.  The dentist and his nurse transformed into carers and opened the French windows in the surgery to make this easier.  I delivered John back home, administered the first dose of drugs, phoned Barbara to make sure she would be au fait when she got in, made sure he was comfortable, and raced back next door for a stiff sherry.

I called this ‘Speed’, because, for John, it was a fast-moving adventure despite everything, and for me, the morning whizzed by.  It’s all relative, isn't it?

Burst Water Main - A Metaphorical Tale

At 11.30 a.m. on Tuesday, a mains water pipe at the top of the hill burst.  The water continued to flow –  an awful lot of it out onto the road, down the gutters and pavements, washing leaves and litter (McDonalds cartons, Tesco bags, lager cans, fag packets) down the hill, distracting small children on their way to nursery and scaring their mums, ending up (as water does) in a lake at the bottom, beyond the capacity of the already rather feeble drains, rat-running cars and vans having to steer round it.  This went on for a day and a night.

Once a team from the water company had turned up, closed the road and started up their drills and diggers, the flow, which had turned yellowish-brown by now, went down to a rill, then a trickle, then ceased, leaving a load of silt in the gutters and on the pavements.   By Friday, they had filled in their hole, re-opened the road and departed, leaving the silt behind.  Rat-run traffic got back to normal.  No long-term harm done.  The rain washed the silt away down the drains.

The above is all true.  What follows is made up.

Turns out that the reason the water main burst was that, in order to supply the new housing estate, the water company felt obliged to increase the pressure down the main, so that’s what they did.  But the housing estate was uninhabited, because the houses couldn’t be sold.  So the increased pressure had nowhere to go.  By a bizarre coincidence, everyone in the avenue happened to turn their mains taps off at exactly 11.30 on that Tuesday.  The pipe couldn’t cope.

The authorities knew that water companies are too big to fail.  They quickly installed even more powerful pumps at the top of the mains pipe, to ensure that this near-catastrophic supply failure could never happen again.  They also took measures to ensure that, if anyone should be silly enough to move into the new housing estate, they wouldn’t be able to afford water.  And they outsourced silt disposal to a newly-formed Russo-Chinese consortium.

OK, here you go ...

June Tabor – Ragged Kingdom

'Love will Tear Us Apart', I feel.  But it's all pretty emotive.

Civility

It’s a nice old-fashioned word, isn’t it?  The Young Foundation, as I’m sure you’ll have seen,  has chosen it to describe the quality people seem most to value in their community.  To quote from the summary on their website:

“[The report argues that] civility is the largely invisible ‘glue' that holds communities together and that experiences of incivility cause hurt, stress and deeper social problems, and has a bigger impact of people's sense of social health than crime statistics. Perhaps most significantly it shows that civility operates on a reciprocal basis and that it is ‘contagious'.”  It goes on, though, to warn that “… people, while quick to see incivility in others, seem far less aware of how their own behaviour can offend.”

At the risk of sounding cynical (moi?), I think there’s a third dimension lurking in there, which is the risk of one’s well-intentioned civil behaviour inadvertently causing, at least, irritation.  Just this morning, I spent half an hour circling an inadequate multi-storey car park in search of a space.  Many other drivers were doing the same.  This car park has clear ‘give way’ markings, which unfortunately give precedence to incoming traffic, an obvious design flaw.  So some new arrivals, recognising that I had a kind of moral precedence, would pause and wave me through.  Very decent of them; but by the time we’d resolved the conflict between their desire to be civil and my wariness at breaking the rules, between us we’d probably added several minutes to the process of deciding it was all a waste of time and heading off back home.

There are many other permutations of how the principle of civility can result in discomfiture.  Just one example: you are walking along a country path.  In the distance you see someone approaching.  Civility requires that you acknowledge each other with a smile and perhaps a word of greeting.  But at what point do you do this?  Too soon and it’ll be missed, and they’ll think you’ve blanked them; leave it too late and they’ll think the same.  It can be very stressful.  I could go on (I said “well done” to a small child who’d succeeded in balancing all the way along the top of a garden wall, and the mother rather obviously thought I was a pervert); the point is, being civil can be more complicated than just being rude.

I leave you with a literary illustration, from ‘The Virginian’ (Owen Wister, 1902):

‘Trampas spoke. "Your bet, you son-of-a --.” The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas: "When you call me that, smile."’

Ideative Plagiarism?

I do hope not.  But recently whenever I start to compose a comment, it ends up as an essay or a rant, and I don’t think it’s polite to post essay-sized comments on other people’s blogs, let alone rants.  (Or is it?  No idea.  I don’t really know the rules of blogiquette.)

Anyway, this one is about tasting wine.  (You know who you are!)  Quite a few years ago, I went to a wine-tasting at my friend P’s.  He was, at the time, a stakeholder in a small mail-order wine merchant, and he’d organised this event, ostensibly for promotional purposes.  P lives just round a few corners, so I was able to walk there and (theoretically) back.  This was a Saturday evening.

The guy who ran the show was absolutely brilliant.  As C (Mrs P) supplied suitable snacks and canapés, he took us through fifteen wines, carefully and informatively leading us from the lightest of light Loires to a dense, almost treacly Barolo, and you really did taste the differences as we progressed.  It was a memorable evening, or would have been had the ‘no swallowing’ rule been rigorously imposed.  As it was, I wanted to order a case of something or other, but the order form somehow became indecipherable.  I seem to remember dancing later on.  And the journey home was, well, staggering.

What I really wanted to say was, it’s impossible to quaff in those quantities nowadays.  Obviously age and degeneration are factors here, but it’s also very hard to find a wine under 14% these days.  I forgot my glasses a while back, so couldn’t read the small print and accidentally came back with two bottles of something which proudly claimed to contain sixteen per cent alcohol.  Sixteen per cent!  That’s practically sherry.  I don’t want to swig near-sherry with my dinner.  Do the producers honestly believe that all we want from our wine is ever-increasing amounts of alcohol?

Anyway anyway, talking of glasses, I found two of  these

at the back of the sideboard, and now I’m going to be sleeping all night with that infuriating jingle. 

Oh, and whoever is constantly hitting my blog with Googlebot, please stop doing it, it's really annoying.  Thank you.

The Quality of Stuff

This was going to be a comment on somebody else’s blog, but it ran away with itself.  As I’m inclined to do, too.

Robert Pirsig went mad trying to define the idea of ‘quality’, or so he claimed.  But he was a philosopher; I come at it from a more practical perspective.

The question is: why do we, or some of us, retain unmanageable quantities of objects which have no intrinsic or practical value?  It can’t just be inertia (although that plays a part, at least for me).  Certainly, I know that my attic contains at least a dozen items of redundant hi-fi equipment that just got dumped up there when upgrades took place; and I know that I can get rid of most of these (once I’ve recruited a willing helper to get them down from the loft – I’m not doing that on my own) by a wide variety of means.  But then I think about just one of them – a beautiful Technics turntable with a smoked Perspex lid and anodised aluminium bodywork – and its elegance is projected into my mind, even though I haven’t seen it for ten years and I know it doesn’t work.  This obviously has some aesthetic worth (it probably belongs in a design museum somewhere) – but that’s not where the quality resides.  That resides in what it did.

I have about 400 vinyl LPs in various boxes up in the third bedroom (aka the dustbowl).  And that’s not counting the other hundred or so in the sideboard down here.  Most of them are worthless, financially (although if anyone wants to make me an offer for a near-mint first pressing of ‘Led Zeppelin’, the one with the turquoise sleeve lettering, start bidding); many are musically too.  But they all, every single one, have this thing I’m calling ‘quality’.  So this afternoon I went up and plucked out just three, more or less at random.  Here they are, with what gives them quality, for me.

The Crusaders : Street Life.  Dancing to the title track with a girl called Victoria at a boring party in about 1984, when my divorce was blossoming.  I never saw her again.

Blood Sweat and Tears : Child Is Father To The Man.  1968, trying to persuade the horn section to play more like those guys.  A very intense drunken debate with all the enthusiasm on my side.

Little Feat : Feats Don’t Fail Me Now.  An inexplicable visit to a stoner friend of a friend somewhere in Surrey, desperate to take a puff but not allowed.

I could go on, but you’re asleep.  But you get my drift.  Every object contains quality, to the extent that it contains the past.  They are all, more or less, Madeleine cakes.

Does anyone else have this problem?

Most of the Blogspot sites I visit allow me to comment as my Google account, by default.  But others require me to 'select profile'.   I select 'Google account'.  It tells me to sign in (even though I already am), and when I do so I get the following very helpful message: 'Cookie value is null for FormRestoration'.

Any hints/tips?  I'm reluctant to throw this into the seething swamp of Google's so-called 'help'.

Anyway, if you're craving comments from me but not getting any, it's not for lack of trying!

Prolepsis, and other words

He doesn't actually start speaking for another 15 minutes, min, but 'The World At One' and other sources reliably, proleptically inform me that amongst other things, Cameron is going to say words to the effect of 'There is light at the end of the tunnel, and my path leads there', and also that  'We can turn the ship around.'  And that we don't need to pay off the Mastercard after all.

I'm a bit confused now, because not having a visual imagination I can't quite construct the metaphorical imagery being called for here.  So, there's this tunnel we're in, right, with more than one path through it?  And there's this light at the end of it?  And it's wide enough to turn a ship around in?  Oh well, I'm sure it'll all be clear by teatime.  But, my credit card bill, £29.02 (Waterstones and Spotify, since you ask) is due in three days' time.  Am I meant to pay it off, or not, or seek independent financial advice?  Come on, Dave, help me. 

Turning to far more important matters, today is the centenary of the birth of Brian O'Nolan, aka Flann O'Brien, aka Myles na Gcopaleen.  I shall speedread 'The Third Policeman' this evening to mark the occasion.  Here's Gerald Scarfe's cover illustration.

Fun with yoghurt

If you open your fridge door, you will probably be able to see a gap, down at the bottom, between the door shelf (the one where you keep the fruit juice carton, the jar of olives and the half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc) and the wall of the fridge.  If you get the angle just right, it is possible, whilst getting out your Tuesday night left-over meal, to knock a tub of yoghurt off an upper shelf and make it lodge very accurately into this gap, without you noticing.

You then have to slam the fridge door quite vigorously.  Get it right, and the yoghurt tub will split precisely down its vertical axis and distribute its contents neatly all over the newly purchased fresh vegetables and salad in the cooler tray. 

I haven’t yet tried this with a full tub of yoghurt, this one was three-quarters empty, but I did conduct a comparable yoghurt-related experiment earlier this year:  exciting curry

[Count yourselves lucky, I was going to write about Theresa's black cat in Plymouth or wherever it was, or Gideon, or worse.]

Same Difference (Caravan Diaries)

It was meant to be very different from my last visit.  But of course, a lot of it was the same.   No obvious disasters, except the grass, which I was expecting: my propensity towards fantasy always leads me to hope that the Flymo fairy has visited in my absence – it did actually happen once.  But no, everything’s the same.  The usual number of rabbits are bouncing around, scuttling off into their hedge-holes whenever they sense an approaching human (they’re right, we’d kill them if we caught them).  A flock of guinea fowl stroll across the field, insouciantly bluffing that they’re not lost.  An unknown butterfly perches on the top of the toolstore.  I open the windows.  My local robin pops into the kitchen, looks up at me, and decides that exit might just be the best strategy.  Robins know exactly where the pushing edge of their luck is.  Within ten minutes, six buzzy flies have entered, immediately claiming that they didn’t really mean to do that.  What is wrong with them?  Don’t they like it out there?  They’re not even politicians, for God’s sake.

I cut the grass.  I walk through the tunnels to the village to get a newspaper.  (It takes more than two days to break addictions.)  I wander down to the low tide line, checking to make sure the geology hasn’t changed too much in fifty years.  (The streams, though, never carve the same course twice across the sand.)  I catch up with a few neighbours.  Kids, grandkids, all doing well.  I manage to intercept Henry, pay the rent and chat about events.  He tells me "Oh well, you're young", which pleases me no end, especially his shocked reaction when I tell him my actual age.

Last time, back in June, it was different.  I’d just come from my first and last face to face meeting with someone, after a long long-distance relationship.  I believed I was deeply in love.  I didn’t want to be here, because there’s no contact with the outside world – no internet, not usually any phone signal – and those were the things I was craving.  I didn’t know what I was doing there.  Late one evening, extraordinarily, the mobile rang.  The call lasted only a few seconds, but I knew who it was.  So I climbed up to the top of the hill and perched on the stile, where there’s usually a signal, called back, and had the conversation.

Yesterday evening,  I stuck on an iPod playlist on shuffle.  It gave me ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, from Blood on the Tracks’.   It all came back, and I realised it wasn’t really different at all.

The M4 beckons

I will be in the car by ten-thirty.  I'll drive through the heatwaves of Swindon and Bristol, across the beautiful bridge into and through the swampy horror of Newport and the blandness of the new Cardiff bypass, until it all gradually fades down into the soft, shrugging and smiling oldness of Carmarthen, before it all dwindles into the road down from Red Roses into Wiseman's Bridge (careful down the hill, 4x4s whoosh up there as if it was the M4) - and then I'll find out - and this is the best bit - I'll find out whether the tide is in, or out, or halfway.

Verbiage Factories

On the day that our greatest industrial benefactor, British Aerospace (BAE) announces it's sacked 3,000 skilled workers because the demand side seems to be drying up (possibly due to the falling off in their traditional customer base of fascistic murderous dictatorships), it's obvious that our economy needs to rebuild its manufacturing base around a different paradigm, and I'm pleased to announce that I have found the answer - self-perpetuating words!

I am not talking about the magnificent energies that are dedicated every minute to the generation of literature, constructive journalism, poetry and lyrics, or even blogs: all of these engender real outcomes, whether tangible, intellectual or, sometimes, emotional.  I am talking about factories which produce and engender nothing but words which in turn produce and engender nothing but more words, until they end up with a miasma of self-perpetuating verbiage, like one of those fractal images that dissolve forever into themselves without anything new ever emerging.

you need to look at this to see what I mean

So, Think Tanks looks like our only growth industry.  If this is so, let's encourage more of them, by whatever monetary, fiscal or nudge measures we can manage.  Shall we start one?  Nah, we probably don't need to.  That list is a year old, and just today I noticed three new ones:  'The Council for the National Interest', 'The Human City Institute', and 'The Financial Inclusion Centre'.  They should be able to sort it out between them.

Insubstantial pageant?

Well, I don't know about that.  The last time I wrote about the replica theatre called 'Shakespeare's Globe' (just in case of confusion with anyone else's), it was about getting there, rather than about the rather flaky performance of 'The Danish Play', which frankly is too packed with quotations for its own good.

So this time, it's  going to be about the actual play.  'Doctor Faustus', by his so-called rival Christopher Marlowe.  I was dreading it.  I kind of assumed, (not knowing anything much about Marlowe other than that he was murdered on some river steps in Deptford, possibly by the KGB, this gleaned from a half-remembered Anthony Burgess novel), that it was going to be a bit of a slog.  The legend of Faust - sell your soul and body to the devil for twenty-five years and then take the hit - well, it isn't exactly a Dan Brown plotline, is it? 

As usual, I'd failed to take into account that plays only really work when they are staged and acted.  Why didn't they teach us that at school?  We spent countless hours force-reading this stuff on the page, failing to make any sense of it at all.  I now know that that wasn't my fault - the teachers didn't really understand their material.  If I was writing my ideal EngLit curriculum (ha ha, as if), I'd start with 'Don't let a child read a play until s/he has seen it performed', and take it from there.

Anyway, on the stage, it was a romp.  High comedy, both verbal and slapstick, scary beasts and spirits and politicians and priests (the Pope was definitely modelled on Peter Cook's cameo in 'The Princess Bride'), and even the tragic ending (can you guess what happens?) was just precisely overacted.

Can't wait for the next one.

Neutrinos

It would be a good idea to stockpile these now, if you can source some.  It seems that experiments at CERN have sent these cheeky little fellows some 400 kilometres to somewhere in Italy, at a speed slightly greater than that of light.  This is causing some consternation, and the scientists responsible are being rightly cautious (they’ve only repeated the results some 15,000 times, so it’s early days); but it appears that, if suitably peer-reviewed and confirmed, this opens up the possibility of time-travel. 

I haven’t yet developed the theoretical framework which would support any practical implementation of this, but I’m sure the guys at Apple are working on the iTime as I write.  It shouldn’t be too hard – after all, photons, when organised properly, can carry vast amounts of information (including these words), so why shouldn’t neutrinos be trained to do the same?  It’s already commonplace to ‘print’ three-dimensional inorganic objects following a blueprint, so organic ones, like people, can’t be far behind.  All we need to do is send an organic printer back to a pre-determined temporal location, scan oneself at this end, and hit ‘send and print’.  The neutrino waves will do the rest, and there we’ll be, watching ourselves conduct that first fumble in the bus shelter.  Or looking over Einstein’s shoulder as he gets special relativity wrong.  Or observing that butterfly flapping its wings in the Brazilian jungle.

Of course, we mustn’t ever intervene.  It’d be tempting though, wouldn’t it?  There are quite a few things I’d be tempted to change given the chance.

PS To my regular silent watchers, greetings, you are very welcome.  Feel free to say hello.

Clothesline

The Federal Reserve’s calculated decision to sell $400bn of short-dated treasury bills to finance the purchase of 6 – 30 year debt, rather than embark on another round of quantitative easing, may alleviate some immediate pressures, but it entails several risks, which are worth spelling out in detail –

Eh?  Oh, I am sorry, I seem to have strayed into the wrong blog there.  I do hope I haven’t caused too much distress. 

Right, I’m okay now.  I was asked to explain how I came to possess a spare clothesline.  But first I have a confession to make.  In fact, when my old one broke under the weight of too many trousers and shirts, I did not, as implied, install the new one.  Instead, I tied a knot in the old one, hauled it back up until the trousers were no longer dusting the patio, and took off into town to buy some CDs and books, and guitar strings and fingerpicks.  I should have taken photos, it would have made this even more interesting.

So, why do I (still) have a spare clothesline?  Serendipity, or perhaps synchronicity.  Two weeks ago, K (who’s 88) announced that hers had broken.  I offered, on my visit next day to Majestic for a top-up, to pop into the Range store next door and pick up a replacement, which I duly did.  £1.40 for 20 metres, that’s not bad, is it?  An hour after I got home, she phoned me to let me know that her kindly neighbour, Ray, had nipped up to B&Q, bought her a new line, and installed it.  We both found this quite amusing.  She offered to pay me the £1.40, but I said don’t be daft, I’ll hang on to it.  It might come in useful, you never know.

Does anyone know what they’re on about?

Our economy here in the ‘United’ ‘Kingdom’ is apparently set to ‘grow’ by ‘only’ 1.1%, and this is a bad thing.  Other so-called statistics bear this out (the ‘bad thing’ bit I mean): unemployment is 2.something million and rising; government borrowing has gone up (yes, up!) to an all-time high of £16 billion for August; and consumer spending is trenching (unless you’re buying Mulberry or such stuff).  And at least one kind of inflation is running at 4.5%.

Anyway, the economy will ‘grow’ (in my version of the language, that means ‘get bigger’) over the next twelve months, by 1.1%.  That’s a positive rather than negative number.  So why is it bad news?  And how does ‘growth’, however meagre, reconcile with all those other negatives?  How come, for example, unemployment is rising whilst the economy is getting a bit bigger?  And how come we need to borrow more whilst we’re brutally slashing our outgoings?

I have pondered before the question of whether it makes sane sense to base all our policies and expectations on the premise that economies can, and must, go on getting bigger and bigger, for ever, or be doomed.  But that’s for another day.   For now, I just don’t get it.  And guess what, I don’t think they do either.

Daritism

I have received many requests to provide definitions for Blogger’s word verification, um, words, of which this is the latest.  Exhaustive analysis allows me to reveal that they fall into three categories: words that look as if they might mean something, but don’t; words that could never by any stretch mean anything; and garbled obscenities.  This leads me to believe that there are not two (as I previously thought) but three teams of verbaliverificationalists at work there: 1) the munchkins, who tease you with blunt-edged neologisms that send you scurrying to the dictionary, then giggle; 2) the oompa loompas, who throw the alphabet up in the air then run across the field kicking letters at each other until they form a pattern which makes them all giggle; and 3) underdeveloped schoolboys, who just giggle then snigger.

For the record, ‘datirism’ (n) means ‘a compulsive impulse to fail to make any sense (or anagram) of a given item of input.’  But that’s not important now.

More to the point, I was led to remember a recent complaint that there were far too many words which all mean the same thing.  I disagreed, but now I’m thinking about the converse: one word which, though spelt and pronounced the same, means two or more quite different things.  Diverted by this idea, and exploring ‘pan’, ‘lie’ and ‘waffle’, I was diverted by Chambers’ totally irrelevant definition of ‘page three’, which I can’t resist quoting in full, because it’s classic Chambers: ‘the page on which, traditionally, certain popular newspapers print nude or semi-nude photographs of female models with well-developed figures.’

Don’t you just love that ‘traditionally’?  I could quibble with the syntax – a photograph cannot be nude or semi-nude – but that’s not important either.

So, to come to the important point, consider the word ‘bid’.  This has two distinct meanings, from two quite different roots, which can be summarised as 1) to offer, and 2) to command.  Here is a snatch of dialogue, possibly from Jane Austen or P G Wodehouse:

ARCHIE: I bid you, Clarinda –

CLARINDA: In what sense, Archie, do you say ‘bid’?

ARCHIE: Forgive me, my darling.  I said ‘bid’. I meant to say ‘bid’.

Catch this!

Wynton Marsalis And Eric Clapton

Bailey

Here's Bailey, in a barrel in my garden.

I believe this cat to be called Bailey purely from an overheard conversation in the post office quite a few years ago.  He's not telling.  But he looks like a Bailey's, doesn't he?  He often lounges around in the garden, and occasionally plonks himself on my back doorstep: it's brick and faces south, so it's a nice warm snuggly spot for a cat to snooze; especially a confidently controlling one.  When I turn up from the car, Bailey thinks about it then decides physical contact is not appropriate, so he slopes off a couple of yards away, sits down and challenges me with his eyes.  He's the rule-maker. 

Bailey is huge.  When I first saw him from the bedroom window, I thought a white panther had escaped from a local zoo, until I realised that there aren't any local zoos around here.  But that's not conclusive.  Here near the centre of Reading, there have been sightings of deer, pheasants, parakeets, red kites and grey wagtails and, once (admittedly a few miles up the road) a wallaby.*  Life is wild around here!

* Sorry, can't resist an old SIHAC definition:  'Wannabe: someone aspiring to be a kangaroo.'

Ironies

Haven't got time to work these up into deathless prose, so here's the raw material:

1. Youth unemployment soaring, so make old people work longer.
2. Must reinforce parental control over feral youngsters, so chop parents' benefits and evict them.
3. Houses can't be sold, so build lots more of them, on fields.
4. Internet makes face-to-face meetings less necessary, so build more railways.

That'll do for now, because I'm hungry.  I have more.

Fiscal dilemma

I received a pile of envelopes from HMRC this morning.  I’m not going into details, naturally, but the upshot is that they've concluded that they have been overtaxing me for the past three years, and will be sending me a big cheque (let’s just say four figures, but I’m not telling you which four). I haven’t a clue whether they’re right, or how they know all this, given that I haven’t completed a tax return for at least five years, because they haven’t asked me to.  I’ll be showing it all to my accountant on Monday evening, over the second G&T, and I think I know what he'll say.

So where’s the dilemma, I hear you ask.  Well, clearly I don’t need this money, as I have comfortably survived the last three years without it.  So what shall I do with it?  I could donate it to Warren Buffett, just to ease the pain - but I don’t have his account number.  Or I could donate it to charity – but which one?  I could hand it back to the Treasury, requesting that they leverage it and hand the proceeds over to Mervyn to help out with the next round of QE – but I’m not doing that.  I could go down the shops  - I received a wonderful birthday card a couple of years ago:

Or I could just throw a humungous party.  But that’s a lot of disruption for you all.  Oh dear, I didn’t have this problem yesterday.

Triple crown magic? (3,5)

Well done!  I have just completed the Guardian Cryptic Crossword (that's the big people's one) for the third day on the trot.  Should I:

a)  Wallow in hubris?
b)  Complain because they're getting too easy?
c)  Throw away the dictionary and the crossword list book?  or
d)  Get out more?

Postscript: it's not often I select a word which means exactly the opposite of what I intended.  I meant, of course, 'amour propre'.  I will try to avoid antonymy in the future.

Mishearings, innuendos and doubles entendres

Ensuing from a series of comments on another blog, involving a crude particle-physics-related anagram, I was prompted to put on an ancient Beach Boys album, containing amongst other joys (and a lot of carp), their cover of the Crystals' 'Then I Kissed Him' (for obvious reasons retitled 'Then I Kissed Her').

My mind was obviously running on some rather dubious tracks, because I heard the line 'I kissed her in a way that I'd never kissed a girl before' and thought "hmm".  (This brought to mind a Guardian correspondence from many years ago, concerning the correct plural of ... no, I'd better not say.  (If anyone knows what the French Connection I'm on about, please get in touch.))

But it did remind me of just a couple of famous mishearings, which I'm sure everybody knows but I can't resist repeating anyway, because they still make me laugh:
From the Shirelles' 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?':  "Can I believe the magic of your size?'
And from Jimi Hendrix's 'Purple Haze':  "Scuse me while I kiss this guy!"
Any more, anyone?

How does that work, then?

My washing machine broke down about seven years ago.  It was, then, itself about fifteen years old.  I wanted one exactly the same: after all, despite the twelve different options on the rotary programme selector and the five mysterious pressable buttons, I'd only ever used it for three purposes: whites, coloureds and occasionally delicates  (when I couldn't be bothered to handwash a pullover). 

So when the old one broke, it was dead easy.  I went to John Lewis and said: "Can I have a new Bosch Lavamat 3100 please?"*  The salesman didn't bat an eyelid.  "I'm sorry sir, that's a very old model.  Obsolete, in fact."  He frowned.  "What you need is the Bosch Lavamat 6100."  My heart sank.

He showed me one.  "Hang on," I said.  "That's pretty much identical to the 3100, isn't it?"  He smiled.  "Outwardly, yes.  Of course, the internal technology has been radically -"

I cut him off.  "I'll take one."

He smiled again.  "Very sensible, those Germans."

Thanks to Z for opening up this rich vein of potential bloggery. 
* I may have made up these model numbers.

Useless grapes

Useless for eating purposes that is, consisting as they do mostly of skin and pip - although they are quite tasty.

I turned them (and some vodka and sugar) into grape vodka last year, quite successfully, applying exactly the same technique as you use for sloe gin.  (see here.)  I started it in October, when they were more or less ripe, and it was ready for Christmas.  It didn't last long into the New Year.

Stately homes of England (a very occasional series)

We had agreed to meet up at midday at Buscot Park, with a view to proceeding up the road to Kelmscott Manor for our picnic, as Buscot didn't open until two.  In the event, although Buscot House and gardens themselves (the bits you pay for if not a NT member) were not yet open, the car park and picnic area were; so, as we were both starving, events were reversed.  We scoffed the picnic, luxuriously seated on sets rather than camp chairs or the ground (and invaded by only two wasps), then drove the long way round to Kelmscott to kill a little time until two o'clock. 

I had no expectations at all.  My experience of so-called stately homes resides mostly in the North and West of England.    We parked ten minutes' walk away, opposite the church, and strolled up to the Manor, past an enticing pub (I don't know my friend well enough yet to suggest stopping off for a swift half).  But the walk up through the village was delightful.  Dry-stone walls are an art form created by craftsmen. (Hey, there's a buzzword -  Arts and Crafts.)  I could have stood and stared at them for tens of minutes. 

Kelmscott is not National Trust, so can charge what it likes: £9 in this case.  We didn't intend to visit there anyway - "I've had enough of Pre-Raphaelites", said my companion - so we made our way back to Buscot.  (Mind you, Buscot charges £8 to non-NT-members, but I think you get a bit more for your money.)  But what a fantastic place!  I use that adjective carefully - there's a lot of fantasy in there.  You wander into the next room and are confronted by a Gainsborough or a Rembrandt juxtaposed (in your mind) against an intimate Faringdon family portrait.  Futuristic glass sculptures sit next to genuine Egyptian godesses and Rossetti houris.  Eclecticism was possibly the crowning glory of the Victorian age; I was reminded of the Burrell collection.

So, having achieved cultural saturation, we wandered around the gardens and the park.  The water garden with its wide lake reminded me of Stour Head; mock temples around the edges.  The Swinging Garden (which I had been informed was for adults) was a disappointment; I'd expected it to be full of swingers behaving badly.  But I think I was too tired for that by then.

And I haven't even mentioned the terracotta warriors.

There's a kind of hush

I live within earshot of Rivermead, the location of the Reading Festival at this time every year.  Usually, I flee the country (to Wales), but for a couple of reasons (wind, rain) that hasn't been possible this year.   So I was rather dreading it.  I love music of nearly every kind (except finger-in-the-ear yokel-folk and massed bagpipes), but I'd rather select it for myself than have it, so to speak, thrust down my lugholes. 

But, so far, something's wrong.  I can hardly hear it.  Admittedly the wind direction is variable, which makes a difference - so maybe Caversham is getting the best of it.  But even allowing for the wind, it's just not loud enough!  Time was, here half a mile away, windows would be trembling, chimneypots wobbling.  What's wrong with the kids of today?  Don't they know how to make a proper noise any more?  I didn't even notice much loud music during the riots.

As I write, I'm ducking between BBC3 and the garden.   Jarvis is giving the performance of his life on the telly, but all I can hear outside is the twiddly synth bits.  I've turned the TV up to 11 (38 actually), and it still sounds tinny.  Crank up the bass, guys, FFS.  I should be down Notting Hill, where they used to know how to do loud.  Still, Elbow are headlining tomorrow; I might wander down Cow Lane, G&T in hand, at about eight.

Is That All There Is?

I wanted to show the actual YouTube video, but for some reason they won't let me embed videos in my blog anymore.  So here's the link, in honour of Jerry Leiber, undoubtedly the greatest lyricist of the last fifty years, who died this week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M&feature=player_embedded

Urgent enquiry

Are these still valid?

And if so, what's their current market value?

One-liners

A man walks into a bar.  He says "Ouch!"
(Apologies for the misprint in earlier editions of this post.)

*

I dreamed this one:
I bought a tin of rat poison.  In the small print it said "Rat Not Included."

*

Q: Why did Madam Blavatsky cross the road?
A: To get to The Other Side.

Come on, you can do better than that ...

VIX

This is seriously loopy.  To put it simplistically, the Volatility Index is a measure of the levels of  'fear' in financial markets, using data drawn from the renowned and reliable, not to say infallible, ratings agency Standard and Poor's.  It's been around in Chicago for years.  So far, so pointless.  But the fun starts here: not only do they measure today's fear, they also calculate predicted fear levels in thirty, sixty and ninety days' time.  Fear futures, in other words.  And best of all, you can trade these futures in the marketplace.  You can buy and sell bets on how afraid market traders might feel by Christmas.  A quick search will put you in touch with people eager to help (at a price of course).

I'll shut up about that now, because my virtual pet snake has just started to eat its own tail again.

In other news, I understand that the markets are seriously jittery at the moment because they don't believe that governments are doing enough to regulate the markets.

And more importantly, have they found Yvonne the Bavarian cow yet?

Reading List

In the absence of anything better to do with my leisure time (apart of course from consulting all your lovely blogs and firing the occasional inane comment at them), I read a lot.  Every fortnight or so, I tramp down to Waterstones and buy whatever of the latest '3 for 2' offers catch my eye.  [Should that be 'B3G1F?]  Failing that, I trawl my shelves for rereadables.  All that may change soon.  In the meantime, here are my twitteresque reviews of the latest half-dozen:

Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru: Sub-early-Pynchon without the jokes.  Can the peyote, Coyote.
The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, Jonathan Coe: I did laugh a lot.  Good vignettes, and an outrageously outrageous ending.
Killshot, Elmore Leonard: Anyone wanna write a thriller with real people on both sides?  Bring it on.   (Actually, 'both' is misleading.  There as many sides as there are characters.)
The Free World, David Bezmozgis: Beautifully written sub-Tolstoyian epic of Russian emigres to Italy in the late seventies.  Easily the best new thing I've read in months.  [Spoiler alert: some of the endings are happy (I think).]
At Home, Bill Bryson: A miracle!  Bryson has managed to write a bloated, humourless, really boring book.
Life, Keith Richards: You had to be there.  And understand open five-string tunings.  I was, and I do.

And your off-the-shelf bonus ball: The Regeneration trilogy by Pat Barker.

The wee beasties will win

In a neat pull-together of several recent threads, I can report that this tiny spider

builds its web, as often as is necessary, between my two grey bins.  This has been going on for some weeks now.    Whenever I go to wheel the bin out, or sometimes even just open a lid, spider seems to see me coming and whizzes off to the nearest bin, quite happy to sacrifice its finely wrought habitat to a greater power in the interest of survival.  Just after I'd taken the photo, a feral wasp stumbled into the web.  I was hoping to capture a battle royal, but the wasp escaped.  The web was trashed though.

There's a lesson in there somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea what it is. 

The Cost of Nothing

My local council collects what they call green waste.  You get given a special green wheelie-bin, and once a fortnight a Vulture comes round and empties it.  They take the waste away, process it and compost it, and you can go up to the depot and buy nice bags of good organic peat-free compost at a very reasonable price.

Last March, everybody received a letter informing us that, from April, the council could no longer provide the free green bin service, and felt obliged to make an annual collection charge of £21.50.  Invoices for this amount would be issued during April.  We could, of course, opt out, but would have to make our own arrangements for disposal of our green waste.  Amazingly, some people chose that course, evidently calculating that the cost of the petrol needed to take it up to the tip for a year, plus the plastic bags and their own time, would amount to less than £21.50.  But most of us shook our heads in wry amusement and took the hit.

I personally thought this was an admirable scheme, fully in accordance with the spirit of modern economics.  It was rather like a sub-prime mortgage - in which you sell somebody something and then take it away from them, charging them for the privilege - in reverse.

Anyway, April came and went, and no invoices appeared.  For some reason, nobody seemed particularly surprised, and indeed most of us had more or less forgotten about it.  The bins continued to get emptied.  And then, early in May, there were some local elections, and the balance of power in my council changed.  'Ah-ha', we thought.  The first duty of a new government is of course to do its best to undo everything the previous one did. 

Sure enough, this morning the green bin collection team came down the road as usual, emptied the bins and delivered a letter, from the Interim Director of Environment Culture and Sport no less, to each house.  The Interim Director apologised for the delay in updating us, but was pleased to announce that it had been decided to 'abandon' this charge.  To quote:

'This means garden waste collections will remain free ...  If you told us at the time that you were not willing to pay the new charges you can still place your bin out for collection.'  And anyone who was nutty enough (there were some, apparently) to pay the £21.50 in advance will get a refund, in due course.

Without wishing to labour the point, I can't help wondering what the full cost was of this exercise in doing precisely nothing.

Feral

It's the word of the week, and for once the journalists, and some members of the public, have nailed it.  It means wild, or even better, reverted to the wild, and that's exactly what's happening.  For the people  in question, there wasn't far to go.  I'll come back to that.  First, four frontline suggestions:

1.  Be like the Turks.  I'm not particularly proposing vigilantism, but those Turkish shopkeepers who just stood up in front of their property and said 'bring it on', and got a result, had the right approach.
2.  Parental responsibility.  Any child, that is someone under eighteen living at home, who intends to go out without a very good reason has to be grounded.  If they refuse, then the parents must tell them that the locks will be changed and they will not be allowed back in the house, ever.  If the child calls the bluff, follow through.
3.  Car boot sales or equivalent.  We all know that there's a vibrant hidden economy built upon stolen or dodgy goods.  (It's not as bad here as it is in Greece or Spain or Italy, but it's rife.)  So downgrade all that.  All that looted stuff is going somewhere.  There's a limit to how many HDTVs or Imodium capsules you can steal for your own use.  The police should be prowling those places over the next few weeks. 
4.  Arrests.  Two people were openly interviewed on BBC TV this evening, effectively defending the violence and looting.  They must be arrested and charged with incitement.

But of course none of that cuts to the quick.  The trouble is that looting is the cultural norm.  A letter to today's Guardian expressed it better than I can, but just consider: bankers, MPs, media slags, police, kids ... they're all looters.  The more that moral decline persists and blooms, the less chance there is of us getting back to decency and compassion and fairness. 

We're all going feral.  'Agenbite of inwit'.  That's what we're losing.  Remorse of conscience.

The Ben Cotta-Al Bergo AllStars

Nobody today remembers this legendary Italian band which, for a brief scintillating moment, encapsulated the zeitgeist of the world-changing musical revolution that swept the southern European avant garde in 1967.  Drawing on sources as diversely esoteric as The Flowerpot Men and The New Vaudeville Band, whilst unafraid to flirt with ‘popular culture’ (Brian Poole and the Tremoloes were a particular influence), the AllStars won a cult following in locales such as downtown Piacenza, the dockland areas of Portofino and the secret fleshpots of San Gimignano. 

The band’s personnel is hard to nail down, shifting as it did in response to physical and mental circumstances, casual invitations to ‘sit in’, and of course the match or otherwise between the availability of musical instruments and people capable of playing them.  But the core membership seems to have been: Ben Cotta, woodwind and air guitar; Al Bergo, cornetto; Sty Zitter, banjo, angklung; Con Limony, bass; Franco Bollo, banging things; Terry Motta, banging other things or sometimes the same ones as Bollo, including each other; Frank Cooler, very high-pitched calming noises; and of course the delightfully clad Bella Feager on occasional vocals.

Quite what contributed to the AllStars’ eventual demise, and the ongoing lawsuits, is difficult to discern.  It has been suggested that ‘lack of musical differences, or similarities’ may have been a contributory factor, but it seems equally likely that the members’ growing amaretto habit, sometimes involving post-gig binge sessions until one or two in the morning, would have tipped the balance between success and ignominious collapse. 

Sadly, no recordings of the AllStars have survived.  Nor, apart from an undated entry in a mouldy old exercise book of mine, does there appear to be any documentary evidence that they ever actually existed.

Do The Default

I have solved the world's financial problems several times here since I started blogging, but my proposals - abolish the financial markets, everybody join the euro, and so on - have been totally ignored.  I can only assume that this is because they are not radical enough.  So it's time to take the velvet glove off.

Somebody recently asked (in the Guardian, of course): if practically everyone is in debt, who do they owe it all to?  Nobody came up with the obvious answer, which is 'each other'.  And nobody has yet explained to my satisfaction how the inverted pyramid of piss which seems to be causing all this trouble came about, or why anyone puts up with it.  On the radio only this morning, I heard an apparently important person, from a position of some authority, explaining in all seriousness that the problem was that governments were not doing enough to convince the markets that governments were doing enough to constrain the activities of the markets.  I simplify, but not by much.

So, let's all default on our debts.  Let's all - countries, corporations, families, people - say 'nope, sorry, can't repay you.'  What would happen then?  Susan from over the road would ask me to lend her £350 to buy a new iBrow or something.  I'd say 'fine, I'll just nip next door and borrow it from Crispian.'  Crispian would gladly say yes, because he knew that Kimberley two doors up would be good for it ...  We'd all be happy, because we'd know that we'd be welcome round Susan's place any time to play with her iBrow.  And the people who make iBrows would be perfectly happy.

Pretty soon everyone would get fed up with wasting all their energy whizzing money faster and faster around the planet, and hunker down to making and doing things that are actually useful to each other. 

Meanwhile, I can't even buy a decent cheese grater.  The company that used to make them has gone bust.

Things to do with the Moon

How about this?  I know you're all Grauniadistas so have probably read all about it already, but here's my take on it:

About a squazzillion years ago, a Mars-sized planet crashed into the raw embryonic thing that was to become the Earth.  It left a huge hole, which much later became the Pacific Ocean.  But the debris flew off into space and became two moons.

After a while, the laws of physics caused the smaller moon to collide gently with the bigger one, so that they merged into one.  They agreed that we would struggle with this truth, once we came along - we needed a bit of time to work out the details.  So they came to a deal, an orbit whereby we would only ever see one side of their marriage.  The two sides were of course very different.

But we have outfoxed them.  We can see the dark side, which is very different.  Craggy and mountainous, rather than smooth and lightly pitted.  I can't see the moons as I write, because they're new.  But it comforts me, in some odd way, to imagine that I came from the same place and will go back there.

1987, what if?

http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?PID=1419147&T=4147

Logic vs. emotion

Some situations are born out of emotion, and one way of dealing with them is by applying logic.  You write down all the emotional triggers that led you to where you are, and you demolish them, one by one, with cold, ruthless logic.  "Was that true?"  "The evidence indicates that it wasn't."   "Why did that happen?"  "Because someone was acting on signals which may not have been intended."  "How come somebody said what they did?"  "They felt it was true at the time."  "Would that really have happened?"  "No."  And so on.

It doesn't work very well.  But at least you know that whilst the emotions will fade away, given time, the cold ruthless logic will endure.

Some of you know what I'm talking about.  Others will just have to guess.

Shibboleth

Basically, I just wanted to write that word, because it has a tang about it.  Some words do that - you would never use them in everyday speech, but you wish you could.  'Visceral' is another one; I don't even know how to say it, but I do know exactly what it means.  Shibboleth, of course, is the Gileadite testword to distinguish an Ephrainite, who could not pronounce sh.   But that's not important now.

The particular sh word I have in mind at the moment is 'Growth'.  (Okay, let's assume they couldn't pronounce th either: I couldn't until I was about seven.)  The U.K. economy has apparently grown by only 0.2% over the last quarter.  This is a bad thing.  Well, I don't know about you, but I don't really particularly want to grow any more.  I'm quite happy with the size I am; certainly no more vertical, and I'll stick with or even reduce the horizontal.  So, given that an economy is, when you get down to it, no more than a bunch of people, why exactly is it a good thing for it to get bigger all the time?  Can't we just steady down, live with what we've got and get on with our lives?

And of course, actually there is no such thing as growth.  There's only redistribution.

Single currencies

There are two different sorts of economy in the Eurozone, which I can characterise (because I'm the one writing this) as Northern and Southern.  They have separate financial policies, because they're separate countries, but they are governed by a single set of interest rates and exchange rates, because there's only the one currency.  The only solutions to this inherent contradiction seem to be either to bust the whole thing up and go back to pesetas, drachmae, lire and escudos, or to muddle through somehow: which is the option currently being leant towards.  Both ways will lead to catastrophe.

So, how about the middle road?  Instead of fissiparating the Euro into seventeen old currencies, how about two?  We can call them the Seuro and the Neuro, if you like.  They get exchanged at a rate of 1:1 on the cutover date, then they go their own separate ways.  I haven't worked out the details yet, it's only nine-thirty, but I can't see any insuperable problems.  The Americans will be a hiccup, but heck, it's all their fault anyway; and the Irish'll just have to decide whether to jump into the Atlantic or the Med.

Prescription drugs

Many years ago, I was in a queue at the chemist's when I overheard the lady in front of me tentatively ask the pharmacist whether it was safe to drink alcohol whilst taking her tablets.  The pharmacist drew himself up to his full height, and pronounced for the whole shop to hear: "Madam, I regard alcohol as a contra-indication for ALL medication!"  The poor woman slunk away, humiliated (and of course none the wiser from a strictly medical perspective).
I was reminded of this when the other day I had to collect a prescription for antibiotics to deal with a minor infection in, let's just say, a certain location.  I'm not sure which was worse: the memory of that awful piece of unprofessional bigotry; or the tiny smile of sympathy that my pharmacist slipped me as he handed me my prescription.

So when I got home, of course I immediately read the leaflet carefully, three times.  Thankfully, the word 'alcohol' didn't appear once.  The dosage instructions were a bit tricksy though.  'Take four a day, evenly spaced, with food.'  I thought about it.  I normally eat three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner.  But that's not a problem - I can easily sneak a snack of some kind in there to make it up to four.  So: 8.00am, 12.30 pm, 5.00pm, 8.30pm - job done!

But then I began to wonder what they meant by 'day'.  Is it my normal waking day (which can vary significantly in length); or is it a twenty-four hour period?  If the latter, then I'll only get six hours' sleep before I have to get up and have a meal.

At least the list of possible side-effects wasn't too bad.  There's a probably apocryphal drug which takes you through just about everything from itching to beri-beri, and ends with the word 'death'.  After that there's the usual instruction: 'In case of any of these, consult your doctor immediately.'

I've settled for plan A, and it seems to be working.

Hackgate

I first read this word in yesterday's paper, then twice in today's, and I've heard it at least three more times on the radio today.  It had to come, because the suffix '-gate' has been applied to pretty well every political scandal since 1972, and has become easily the most insidious journalistic cliche of the past fifty years.  Of course, as Marina Hyde points out in the Guardian, the original had nothing whatsoever to do with water, or, for that matter, any sort of gate.  Watergate was just the name of a building.  I'd like to be able to identify the first journalist to appropriate the last syllable of this word as a generic suffix, and have a word with them, but I haven't the energy.

What gets me about this particular piece of linguistic abuse, though, is that it misses the point.  The current discourse should no longer be about phone hacking.  That was merely the entry point, the little crack in a huge wall, into which a much bigger wedge needs to be driven.  The 'Hackgate' neologistic cliche plays into the hands of the Murdochs of this world, because it enables them to trivialise the much bigger issues at stake.  (I presume you all know what those are, but just in case, I'll summarise them in Lord Acton's two words: 'Power Corrupts'.)  By keeping it at that level of specifics, it lets them damp it down (with carefully orchestrated play-acting - did anyone see Murdoch's performance yesterday? It reminded me of Ernest Saunders - and was the foam-pie thrower briefed, or employed?) and get on with the more important business of launching the Scum on Sunday.  And buying the next generation of rotten politicians and policemen.

Phew, that felt good!  Haven't had a good rant for ages.

Sun Burn

I'm lucky or smart enough to have a retirement income that slightly exceeds my fairly modest day-to-day needs.  I could of course expand those needs to soak up the surplus.  But all the extra things I'd spend it on would be time bound.  Every CD or movie you buy, every new car or boat or helicopter, these all require the consumption of the one commodity none of us can buy more of - hours. 

So what drives these people?  It's obviously not money, I've just proved that.  You can't eat, drink, shelter under, smoke, have sex with money.  Money doesn't get you a sunrise or a great conversation or an emotional crisis that expands your consciousness.  So what's left?

It must be power.  They must be deluded enough to believe that power - which is, when it comes down to it, the ability to use money to worsen other people's lives - is paramount, above all else.  How sad.

So what I suggest is that next Tuesday, when Rupert and his fellow-cancers are being dragged kicking and squirming to account for themselves and their insidious corruption of all that used to be good in this world, we all go down the local shop and buy every single copy of the Sun newspaper.  They only cost 30p each, so a fiver should cover it.  Get there early and barge your way to the front of the queue.  Then take them home and have a bonfire, preferably in the street.

Salutations

I just posted a comment on a blog, and the computer that deals with these matters immediately replied with a friendly message which began with the word 'Howdy'.

I don't know about you, but for me this triggered a silver wave of nostalgia.  The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy ... They all said 'howdy' to heroes and villains, before shooting (never fatally) or embracing (never erotically) them.  I suspect and fear that remakes or reworkings of these fifties classics are in some perverted Hollywood production pipeline, probably funded by an offshoot of News Corp.  You heard it here first.  They're already doing 'Dallas'.

I digress.  What really interests me is: how many variations of 'Howdy' can you come up with, within the context?  I can think of several, but wouldn't wish to spoil your fun.                      

Read the small print

The hotel seemed very nice.  The staff were friendly and the room, once I found it after negotiating several up-and-down flights of wooden hills, was clean and adequately equipped.  And the view across the harbour was delightful.  'This will do me for three nights,' I thought.

As I looked more closely at the facilities, I noticed this, printed on the outside of an envelope on the bedside table:

'I wonder what that means?', I thought, and forgot about it.

When I made my way to bed, much later, I found out.  The hotel was adjoined to a popular pub, which had an outside terrace for admirers of the view, and for smokers.  Smokers seem to talk much louder than non-smokers, to make more bad jokes and to laugh a lot.  I say smokers, because there were no view-admirers - it was dark - and the rain was falling steadily.  Smokers are also desperately resilient.

But the noise ended at about 11.15, I got a good night's sleep and forgot about it again.

Next night, the same thing happened, but I was wise to it by then.  Come 11.30, they'll be away.  And they were.  But then, the pub staff decided to have a chat, out on the terrace.  This was worse, because the conversation was inaudible most of the time, but then, just as I was slipping away, someone would make a good joke.  I don't know if you've ever been in a similar situation, but the worst of it is that you lie there wondering if that was the last one, or if not when the next one will be along.

It was time for the earplugs.  Here are the instructions for installing them:

Try that at midnight.  They sort of work, but they're uncomfortable enough to keep you awake.

By 1.30, I'd had enough.  I opened the window and had a word.  I was very polite.  "I say, would you be so kind as to put a focken sock in it?  Some people up here are trying to get some bleeping sleep!  Thank you SOO much."

That did the trick. 

By the final evening, the word had obviously gone out that there was a Scillonian demon residing up there.  The revellers meekly let themselves be shepherded off the terrace, at eleven sharp, by the ferocious landlady, and I slept soundly until five-thirty, when the seagulls started their dawn chorus.

Box-ticking exercise

Off on me hols tomorrow.  I'll tick the boxes when I get back.  Click and enlarge to enjoy.

Memories are made of something

I was hunting through an old wine box up in the spare bedroom for a notebook containing the first chapter of a children's story I'd started to write about twenty years ago, when instead these are what I found.

Is there anyone out there old enough for this to bring tears to their eyes?

I can do the backs of the EP sleeves as well, if coerced - and I might even have the records that used to live inside them.