Scar Itch

I was going to write a comical piece about the several times in my life that I have fallen over, and the consequences; but then I got this itch in the pulp of my right thumb.  Proust did taste and smell, of course, and we all do sight and sound, all the time.  But there aren’t many times, I think, when the sense of touch triggers a madeleine moment.  This is one.

It was the early summer of 1964, a Saturday evening.  We used to go to the Bure Club at Highcliffe as often as we could afford it.  It was one of the only two places to be in the Bournemouth area (the other being the Disque a Gogo in Holdenhurst Road).  The big visiting American blues names played the Bure: Hooker, Muddy, I forget who else.  On this occasion it was the Animals, and it was important to be there early, so as to get a couple of beers sunk and be near the front when they came on.  We were anti-Animals, for all sorts of reasons.  They were slick, commercial, about to sell out and, to be honest, just too bloody good.  Whereas we were thrashing around trying to put together a group, any sort of group.  A drummer, any sort of drummer, was number three on my wish list, after a couple of girls whose names I remember (but had better not mention here).

I was late.  I’m not sure why, probably due to negotiation with my parents about use of the car, a ritual which had to be performed even though the outcome was always the same (ending with and don’t forget to put some petrol in!).  So I parked up and ran.  You had to park outside the grounds and then proceed on foot through the entrance and up a gravel drive.  In the middle of the gateway there was one of those sticking-up metal stops that prevent the gate going the wrong way when it’s closed.  That’s what I tripped over.

And that’s the fall-over – the film.  My legs stop dead whilst the rest of me carries on.  My right arm goes out to break the fall, palm first.  Gravel digs in.  I get up, rather too quickly, and carry on; blood is dribbling from my hand, but I find a handkerchief and mop it up.  It doesn’t seem too bad.  I get inside the club …

Three days later, Dr Hall-Reid (rather viciously I thought) scrubbed away the incipient gangrene or whatever it was, put a dressing on, prescribed some penicillin and told me I was lucky.  Some sympathetic musical colleague said ‘Yes, lucky it wasn’t your left, or you wouldn’t be able to play.’

The scar’s survived, for five decades.  It’s tiny, quarter of an inch long and just detectable by touch if you know it’s there.  It throws up an itch every so often. 

I'm sure that's what they said ...

Well, not totally certain of this one, and can't be arsed to search any longer for a replay, but I'm pretty sure I heard Ed Milliband, in the Commons, refer to poor people who "... earn in a week what the Chancellor pays for his annual skiing holiday!"  Erm... maybe he meant year?

I'm absolutely sure of this one: Michael Gove  on working parents who, because of the school strikes, "... have to scrabble around for expensive childcare."  I daren't even start to try deconstructing that!

Old-fashionedChristmas

I like this!

Emmy The Great – This Is Christmas

Lit crit

I sometimes read that people are considering giving up blogging.  I’d be the last to question this kind of personal decision, it’s none of my business.  Indeed, I’ve given up myself, several times, sometimes for whole days, for my own reasons.

But I hope that the main reason people carry on is that they believe they have something to offer, as entertainment, provocation, or often just plain simple human sharing (not to mention other animals).  I certainly get all of these from the blogs I read and the interactions through the comments.  And, most importantly, I get to read loads of brilliant writing, without having to stir from my sofa or donate a penny to Amazon or Waterstone’s.  So thanks, all of you.

Which brings me neatly to my self-serving point.  I really enjoyed the opportunity to review the start of Clare’s novel: it was a brave and intriguing extension of the bloglit concept, and I hope she got something from it too.  So, does anyone fancy helping me with my children’s novel, ‘Clock and Jeremy’?  It’s a fantasy aimed at the 10 – 12 readership.  Although stylistic criticism is obviously welcome, what I’m really after is ‘where the hell do I take this story from here??’

You can email me via my profile if you want to play.

Words and Music

I had this conversation during a very noisy party last Saturday night.  As discos are, the music was too loud for anyone to hear what the other person was saying, so most of it consisted of lip reading, sign and body language.  I’ve been to too many of these over the years, and there is always a consensus, next day, that conversations – long, intense, heartfelt conversations, lasting for tens of minutes – have taken place, during which intimacies have been exchanged, anxieties exposed, hopes and fears poured out … but luckily, it’s all wiped out because, actually, you only managed to hear about one word in ten.  This isn’t to say that communication didn’t take place: indeed, the heard one in ten might have said more than the unheard nine.  But there’s something to be said for those words that aren’t heard.

So, Zoe was asking me about music, and during a lull I was able to hear and consider her question, which was to do with whether you should respond more to the lyrics or the music of a song.  She felt, I think, that most of the time, at least in the music she liked, lyrics were a distraction, if not an irrelevance, and I have a lot of sympathy with this view.  When I listen to a song, very often it tends to be one or the other; the perfect marriage of the two is rare.  Dylan said ‘If I can sing it, it’s a song; if I can’t, it’s a poem’, but that’s a bit simplistic.  Leonard Cohen wrote an eighty-two verse poem which he distilled down to a song called ‘Hallelujah’, and yet at the moment I’m hearing the tune more than the words.

I was about to counter with ‘Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin’ going on’ as a perfect storm, but then the disco kicked back in and words became irrelevant.

Something with a smile

I don't usually need plastic bags at the supermarket, but occasionally one gets caught short.

ME: Could I have a bag for that please?
ASSISTANT:  I'm sorry, we're out of bags.  [Smiles apologetically, then glances to his left.]  But Customer Services might have some.

I follow his glance.  Customer Services is four feet along the same counter.

It was the smile that did it for me, I think.

I know, I’ve said it before …

… but that’s no reason not to say it again, and again, and again. 

‘Growth’ is ‘predicted’ to ‘flatline’ at 1% for this and next year.  That’s plus 1%, which is bad news.  I have no idea what this means, and nor, it seems, do any of the politicians, economists or journalists who spray this kind of talk around.  Percentages mean nothing unless it’s clear what the percentage is of – ask any statistician.  Is it per annum, which means the base would be the twelve months preceding the date of the prediction?  Or month by month, for example comparing October this year to October last year?  Or some other formula?  I know there’s an answer, but I have never seen it clearly written down.  The Wikipedia article starts ‘This article has multiple issues’, and goes on from there, which just about nails it; but nowhere, as far as I can see, does it define a consensual mechanism by which it’s measured.  And yet, they carry on spraying, for all the world as if they were saying something meaningful.  They’re not.

I’m not going down the ethical, social or biodynamic byways, that’ll have to be for another day, but let’s just pretend that this ‘growth’ stuff constitutes, in some way, an increase in productive economic activity.  So, if this activity, however measured (but with the proviso that it as to be productive), was, say, 100 units in year one, in year two it would be 101.  In year three, just over 102, and so on.  That’s an increase (however slow against perceived expectations).  So, given that economic activity is increasing exponentially, year on year, how come what I’ll call well-being (for example, employment, earnings for those employed, support for those who aren’t or can’t be, education for entrants, etc.) is, by any objective measure, declining?

That’s enough.  Well, nearly.  On a lighter note, I heard Mervyn King tell us that he can’t predict what’s going to happen to the euro next week, never mind next year; and then go on solemnly to deliver his confident forecasts for growth, inflation, interest rates, solar flares, asteroid activities, alien invasion (okay, I exaggerate slightly).  Ha ha.  Not funny, actually.

Alternating current account

Like many people, I pay for my electricity by monthly direct debit, spreading the cost evenly across the year.  As you know, the idea is that a surplus at the end of the summer covers the extra consumption during the winter. 

So when I got my six-monthly bill the other day I was pleased to see that they owed me about £150.  Good, I thought, that’ll see me through the next few months when it’s colder, darker and more boring.  The system’s working.  Then I read on.  “…which we will refund to your bank account on or soon after 6 November 2011.”  Hang on, though: that means that, come the spring, I’ll owe them money; and I bet they’ll put my monthly payments up in response, which means next autumn they’ll owe me more money, which they’ll refund, which means … you get the picture.  A positive feedback loop.

I remember a variant of this a few years back, when instead of issuing a refund, they proposed to reduce my payments over the winter, which would mean … oh, I can’t go on.  On that occasion I phoned them up and explained.  “Oh yes, the computer does that,” the call centre told me.  “We have to go in and override it.  We get this all the time.”

I don’t think I can be bothered to phone this time, but if I do I want a word with that computer.

Wodehouse or Chandler?

There are no other contenders for the title (which I'm not even going to bother to identify).  To help you along, here are a couple of quotes, picked more or less at random:

There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those moustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.
Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer.  The clerk snapped at Degarmo's back like a terrier.
'One moment, please.  Whom did you wish to see?'
Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly.  'Did he say "whom"?'
'Yeah, but don't hit him,' I said.  'There is such a word.'
Degarmo licked his lips.  'I knew there was,' he said.  'I often wondered where they kept it.'

And -

Women never know when to stop on these occasions.
I remember Mrs Bingo Little once telling me, shortly after their marriage, that Bingo said poetic things to her about sunsets - his best friends being perfectly aware, of course, that the odd egg never noticed a sunset in his life and that, if he did by a fluke ever happen to do so, the only thing he would say about it would be that it reminded him of a slice of roast beef, cooked just right.
However, you can't call a girl a liar; so, as I say, I said: 'Well, well!'

Difficult call, isn't it?

But I must say, I did enjoy typing that!

Nothing really changes

For some reason, Soaring posted the following in a blog comment.  It concerns the resignation, on the 18^th of March 1911, of the Italian prime minister Luigi Luzatti:

Although a man of first-class financial ability, great honesty and wide culture, he had not the strength of character necessary to lead a government: he showed lack of energy in dealing with opposition and tried to avoid all measures likely to make him unpopular.

I promised to come up with an equivalent to reflect today’s equivalent:

Although a man of fourth-class financial integrity, great manoeuvrability and bunga bunga culture, he had not the brown-nosed flexibility necessary to lead a government: he showed excess of early-day corruption in dealing with opposition and tried to encourage all measures likely to make him richer.

Will that do?

Sometime for your diary

I'm sure everybody already knows this, but around coffee time next Friday, here in Britain, it will be
11:11:11:11:11:11.  GMT.

Bearing Debts...

They've been on a bit of a bender,
The Eurozone's champion spender;
But the Oracle speaks:
"We shall bail out those Greeks;
Just one caveat: no referenda!"

Alternative lines 3 - 4:
But we'll bail out those Greeks
(and curate their antiques) -

Endangered Species

I see that zebra crossings are disappearing due to the march of technology.  Those are the ones marked by Belisha beacons (named in 1934 after half of the Transport Minister Leslie Hore-Belisha, the other half having presumably already been taken).

Well, not around here.  Oxford Road currently contains about nine pelicans or puffins or whatever they’re called (the ones controlled by lights), and there is a proposal (not yet implemented, but it’s only been four months) to replace several of these with zebras, so as to speed up the buses.  I suggested at a local meeting that doing away with the bus stops would achieve this even better, but for some reason that didn’t go down very well.

I do hope the zebra crossing doesn’t become entirely extinct, as this would involve the loss of one of my favourite road signs, in Honey End Lane: ‘HUMPED ZEBRA CROSSING’.

*

In other completely unrelated news, I’ve just heard some minister, on ‘The World At One’, explain that the 0.5% growth figures must be welcomed as ‘better than predicted’.  Doesn't he mean ‘the predictions were wrong’?

Why do I feel so tired?

Oh, I know, it's because my body clock is an hour ahead of my clock clock.  I wonder if anyone has computed the cost of this meaningless biannual ritual.  I have banged on about this year after year, inducing global stupefaction - but still they don't listen!  And now, I read, our government is going (no consultation, referendum, nothing like that) to convert us to Central European Time, so that ... oh, I'm too tired to go on deconstructing this idiocy.  Why can't they just accept that it gets dark in the winter and lighter in the summer, and we are where we are, in terms of the planet's rotation?  Get over it.

Blogiquette

It’s easy for me to say, because not many people read my blog, and I don’t regularly read that many others.  But I can’t help but become aware that, even within my narrow range, some odd things seem to happen.  People apparently masquerade.  So-called ‘blogmeets’ are arranged and, sometimes, end in tears.  And there are creepy people who visit frequently (sometimes for hours) but never ever identify themselves or comment.  (I'm not counting casual passers-by or one-off search results; I'll even let googlebot off the hook, even though I'd rather it didn't exist.)

So here are some of the rules I play by:

·         I won’t instigate a ‘blogmeet’.  If anyone wants one, they can easily contact me, and I’ll take it at face value and consider my response.  But I’ve concluded (from just my one experience) that it’s a risky endeavour.  It’s very easy for false expectations to set in when the written word is the only medium of contact. 

·         I will never pretend to be someone I’m not.  I really don’t understand why anyone would do that  – leaving aside that they’re obviously sick, they’re going to get found out, aren’t they?  So if I see someone who I suspect might be false, I’ll find them out, believe me.

·         If I find a blog that interests me and I feel inclined to read more of it, I’ll consider ‘officially’ following it, so that the author knows who I am.  (It’s not nice to feel stalked.)  And I’ll post a quick comment, introducing myself, even just a ‘hello, like your blog’.  It does no harm – they can always tell me to blog off.

·         And if I post a comment, either on my own or someone else’s blog, which I later think is inappropriate, or offensive, or plain point-missing, I’ll delete it asap (possibly replacing it with a better one).

But within that framework, I will continue to fire off my rants, raves and trivia, like it says on the tin.  I think nearly everyone conforms to these simple norms of decency.

Google plus

I've just joined Google+.  I have absolutely no idea what this means.  Something like this?

• The ladybirds have made it into the kitchen.  I repatriated twelve, then got out the Raid spray.  I'm not particularly proud of this.
• I have bought 'winter tyres' for the BMW, on the hope that I won't have to abandon the car quite so many times this winter.
• Still haven't put any of the new strings on the guitars.  Must be done.
• I have about four other things I want to blog about, but one will do for this evening (see later).

Have I got the idea?

We are the 99%

Have I got that right?  Yes, but it's a bit more complicated.  The 99% are the 2.6%, and the 1% are the 49%.  And % of what?  Those figures need to be swapped over.  Give 99% 49% and 1% 2.6%, and I guarantee we'll get more work done.

Abstruse Goose

I assume everybody already follows AG, but just in case:

http://abstrusegoose.com/406

(Hit 'random' for more joy.  And don't miss the hover-overs.)

Risky Parlour Game

Inspired by Z’s recent post as others see us, I’ve dreamt this up.  Probably best played after lunch on Boxing Day, but before the singing and the dancing start.

Here are the rules, as I envisage them:

Everyone gets issued with a piece of paper containing a list of adjectives (see below for a starter kit, drawn partly but not entirely from the original, but the quizmaster can tune it if s/he wants to), from which each player selects the four that they think best describe themselves.  Tick those four words.

The entries are put into a hat (or something) and then drawn at random.  (If you get your own, you throw it back in.)

Each player then has to identify the person they think has described themselves, on the entry they have drawn, write the name of that person on the back of the slip, and their own name (this is crucial), and put it back in the hat.

The game could go in several directions from here.  The simplest is for the quizmaster just to read out the results, using a formula such as “George says that Elegant, Naïve, Challenging and Sweet describes Marcus.”  This could then be open to challenge and debate.  Alternatively, you could read out the judgements, and of whom they were made, and ask the subject to identify who saw them that way.  Or … Heck, make up your own.

LAZY

HAPPY
ELEGANT
UNDERSTANDING
NAÏVE
PASSIONATE
SENSIBLE
ELOQUENT
CHALLENGING
THOUGHTFUL
COURAGEOUS
WITTY
IMPATIENT
OUTSPOKEN
SENTIMENTAL
STUBBORN
CHARMING
PATIENT
LOVELY
SWEET
INSECURE

Ninety-nine plus one

Here’s an idea.  Over the last few days, I’ve seen various kinds of items priced at £2.99, or suchlike.  When decimalisation came in, in 1971, this was a marketing ploy to try and fool people that they were paying £2, rather than £3.  Obviously we all saw through that pretty quickly, and nobody falls for it any more, if they ever did.  But the practice has persisted; indeed, it wasn’t anything new even back then: I remember price tags such as £1/19/6d, and of course there used to be the pernicious guinea (which worked the other way).

So, instead of giving the customer the 1p change, let’s devise a system that feeds all those pennies into some kind of kitty (preferably local rather than central), which can then be fed back into the much-needed process of bottom-up economic recovery.  The vendor loses nothing, and the purchaser won’t really notice in the larger scheme of things.  Obviously I haven’t done the maths, but I bet there’s a huge amount of money involved.

And for those who want to opt out, we can always introduce a 99p coin.

Ladies? Birds? Bugs?

I couldn’t get any pictures, but here’s a delightful one from a favourite photo-artist:

feliciti - hang loose

But yesterday, when the sun was full on the back of the house, there were several dozens of them.  Far more than the forty-two I rehabilitated last week during the Great Grape Picking Adventure.  At one point, I felt like a beekeeper.  I’m ashamed to say that I became less than solicitous in my behaviour towards them, and a few got swatted.  And as for the ones that decided to come indoors – well, there are rules about invasiveness, aren’t there?  They shouldn’t be immigrating hidden up my sleeves or in my hair.  I respect their right to inhabit the outdoors; they should equally respect my right to an insect-free house.  They do leave a nasty orange stain on the carpet as well.

Most of them were lurking around the back door.  I gather that this is fairly usual at this time of the year, as they look for warm places.  But I’ve never seen it on this scale before.  I can only put it down to the grape vodka.  I’ve told them and told them that it won’t be ready till the New Year, but they just don’t listen.  Tuh.

Dancing Help - The Results

Thank you all so much for your contributions.  Here's the consolidated playlist, insofar as the songs can be found on Spotify:

Dancing help

The polls are still open - vote early and often.  But I am only allowed two candidates on the RSVP card (which has to be sent off quite soon), so in the spirit of modern democracy I am ignoring all your votes and doing just what I choose, which at the moment is:

Roadrunner, by Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers (sadly not available on Spotify), and

Express Yourself, by Charles Wright And The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band (on the playlist).

The wedding is on 5 February, so please feel free to stick this playlist (as amended) on and bop on down with us at about 10.30 p.m.

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.