The Meaning of Bardrainney (Inver)

As far as I can remember (I can’t find my copy), ‘The Meaning of Liff’ does not offer a word for ‘the sensation of stale wine trickling down your sleeve at the bottlebank’.  After this morning, I needed such a word, and after a cursory gazetteer scan I lighted on the above, which I think does the job.  Although it may be too long, and maybe insufficiently expletable.  I did consider Zouch (Notts), Wetwang (W. Yorks) and Sturry (Kent).

Two visits down, probably two to go.  I’m spreading my custom around three local facilities – two Tescos and an Asda – because I don’t want to be tagged as some kind of bottle-sniffing freak by the CCTV monitor guys.  I imagine them going “Him again?” and opening a book on the exact timing of my next visit.

Terribly Strange

Huh?  What’s going on?   This place looks different.  That table doesn’t belong there, and that sofa’s crossed the room east to west … how come my maracas and tambourine are on the floor? The bathroom window really shouldn’t be open … and who brought all these empty bottles and half-filled glasses into my house and garden?  I sit down, on something.  After a while, it starts to come back.  Oh yeah, it was my birthday yesterday.

My brother-in-law, who’s an accountant, wrote in their card “have a good 70th year!”  This level of numeracy, if replicated across the field of accountancy, could explain a lot;  but I’ll settle for the bonus.  I am, of course, now in my 71^st year.  How does it feel, you ask?  Well, not too bad so far, considering.

Seriously (Ed: wha?), it was a fabulous party, and to anyone who was here and reads this, thank you, thank you.   Actually, the same to anyone who was here and doesn’t read this.  And to anyone who wasn’t here and … you get my drift.  A few unanswered questions:

How come only 22 of the 30 bottles of Pelorus got consumed?

And how come somebody complained, about 1 a.m., that we’d run out of Pelorus?

Why didn’t I anticipate the demand for lager amongst the younger generation?  (Ed: Who knew?)

Where is the magic playlist that will provoke instant and perpetual dancing by all ages, tastes and capabilities?  Apple, get on it!  But thank you Tracey for getting pretty close.

Somebody left 55p, 50 on the patio and 5 on the sideboard.  They are welcome to come and claim it (Ed: please bring proof of ownership), otherwise I shall assume it’s a tip.

Pictures might follow, but I’m not promising until the legal team have pronounced.

Difficult Choices

Waitrose run a scheme whereby you’re given a green tiddlywink at the checkout, which you can donate to one of three local charities on your way out, by dropping it into your chosen box.  Each month, they share out their donation kitty between the three charities, applying some abstruse formula which we don’t need to go into here (mainly because I don’t know what it is).

The checkout staff are, I guess, trained to issue a token with every receipt as a matter of course, and most of them do.  One or two politely ask if you’d like one, which is nice but risky, as they quite often end up having to explain the system to someone who turns out to be impervious to explanations – I’ve been backed up in that queue a few times.

I think this is a brilliant idea, which the Government should take a closer look at (as they should all things John Lewis), and I try to make a considered choice.  It’s usually not difficult to identify the clear winner.  It will be voluntary, health-related and emotionally appealing.  Too often, it’s something the public sector should be doing but can’t, or won’t.  Towards the end of the month, tactical voting might come into play, as the clear winner has indeed clearly won, so I have to decide who comes second.  But that’s not so easy: there are school playgrounds, animal welfare groups, open spaces, various sports, brass bands … 

The kindly queue at the checkout can be outdone by the queue of parents with toddlers at the donation boxes.  My considerable reserves of patience will, I admit, sometimes run low as I wait for mum or dad to explain the difference between helping children with ADS versus buying new stumps for the cricket club versus relocating a colony of rare newts, to a child whose only real interest is getting the tiddlywink into the slot and watching it drop all the way to the pile at the bottom.

This has its compensations too, though.  Yesterday I arrived just in time to hear a three year old, who’d clearly been giving the matter some attention, say: “Bats.  I like bats.”

I smiled at the mum.  “Good choice,” I said.  She blanked me; but her son looked at me, smiled back, and nodded.

Desert Island Songwriters

A leading article in the Guardian recently made the questionable claim that Paul McCartney was the twentieth century’s greatest songwriter.  Hmm.

 Most of the Beatles’ early hits (1963-65) were genuine collaborations, but John was in large part the instigator, as Ian McDonald amply demonstrates in ‘Revolution In The Head’.  It was only from ‘Rubber Soul’ onwards (okay I know about ‘Yesterday’) that their individual identities started to show through, and certainly Paul was the sole author of quite a few masterworks – ‘Drive My Car’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Blackbird’, ‘Hey Jude’.

But his Beatles songs do not a canon make, and after the split, that is for the subsequent forty years, how many memorable McCartney songs can you name?  I can manage four: ‘Band On The Run,’ ‘Mull of Kintyre’, ‘The Frog Chorus’, and ‘Live And Let Die’.  Nuff said.  And now, here come the big boys.

It’s not that easy, because to qualify you need to have produced a substantial corpus of songs which are memorable both lyrically and melodically; and also, playing by the book, you have to be a soloist.  Sadly, that rules out collaborations such as the Gershwins, Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Rodgers and anyone, Kern and anyone.  There’s also a difficulty regarding length of service – it’s quite possible that Eminem will make it to the 21^st century list, he’s just not old enough yet.  Anyway, here goes:

Cole Porter

Irving Berlin

Hoagy Carmichael

Bob Dylan

Smokey Robinson

Leonard Cohen

Neil Young (maybe)

Erm …

Obviously, I only know what I know.  So, any other candidates?  Please open my ears to them, before I climb aboard and sail off into the sunset towards that island.

I Have Absolutely Nothing To Say

But it’s still early, the Marlborough Pinot Noir is getting better by the sip, there’s nothing on the telly, it’s 106 miles to Chicago … (sorry, The Blues Brothers took over my brain there for an instant.)

I found a book called “Wrinklies’ Wit & Wisdom” which someone wittily gave me five years ago.  Ninety nine per cent of it is crap, but here are a few that amused me:

Interviewer:  To what do you attribute your long life?

Sir Malcolm Sargent: To the fact that I haven’t died yet.

Bob Monkhouse:  The doctor said ‘I have good news and bad news.  The good news is: you’re not a hypochondriac.’

And a probably apocryphal Queen Mother quote:

(to her daughter):  A glass of wine with lunch?  Is that wise?  You know you have to reign all afternoon.

Of Newspapers, Towers, Bricks and Clothes

A couple of weeks ago, my neighbour asked me, over the fence, if I’d be kind enough to save my newspapers for a while, instead of recycle-binning them.   “It’s for a school project,” she almost explained.  “They have to build a tower, then lay an egg on top.  Ta lots, must fly.”

Naturally I agreed, and even managed to comply, dedicating a twelve-bottle wine box (empty) to the purpose.  This afternoon C came to collect the proceeds, and gave me a little more detail.  The kids have to build the tallest free-standing tower they can out of newspaper and sellotape, and balance an egg on top for at least ten seconds.  “Though I’m working on that,” she added.  “Ten’s quite a lot of seconds when you think about it.”

Me being me, I spent a certain amount of the rest of the afternoon considering how I’d go about this task.  There were no particular design constraints, so it came down to a trade-off between height and stability: should I go for a Centre Point or Shard model?  Shard, probably, a pyramid is inherently more stable than a monolith.  But the egg-balancing platform is correspondingly smaller … Am I allowed to fashion a kind of newspaper eggcup and tape it to the top?  Assume yes, in fact assume I’m allowed to do anything that isn’t explicitly forbidden.  That used to be a handy guiding principle for life, though I’m not so sure nowadays …  Oh, and how many newspapers have I got?  And, and …  The questions kept flooding in; any scientist will tell you that that’s what happens.

Of course, I lost interest.  Hell, I don’t even go to that school.  But it reminded me of those team-building exercises we used to have to go through on team-building courses.  There was one, funnily enough, involving tower-building from improbable materials – toilet roll tubes may have been involved.  More memorable was the one where a group of six strangers were required to create an organisation which would assemble meaningless objects out of a restricted supply of stickle bricks.  That was fun, the best bit being finding a role for the Divisional Director which would both preserve his self-regard and be within his capabilities.  I think he ended up being at the back end of the production line, but allowed to deliver the finished product to the customer.

The one that sticks in my mind, though not my memory, wasn’t really an exercise, more of a scene-setter.  A mixed group of about eight of us, seated at random round a table, were invited by the teenage mid-Atlantic convenor to turn to our neighbour, introduce ourselves, and exchange an item of clothing.  I wish I could remember how that worked out.

Bank Holiday

I think one’s overdue, don’t you?  But this time let’s big it up a bit. 

I don’t mean the sort of bank that looks after my money for me, pays my bills when I tell it to, keeps my diamonds in a safe, and charges me a reasonable, profitable fee for doing all that  (although there’s an unfilled niche market for one or two of those, it seems).  You know what kind of bank I mean.

On the news this evening, there was the entirely non-ironic juxtaposition, within minutes of each other, of the news of Barclays’(and, obviously, many others’) bent touts, under orders from their untaxed moral-free puppet-masters, having rigged fundamental market prices, over years – not just a rogue operative acting alone, even they recognise that one doesn’t wash any more – to their own benefit (and to the cost of the rest of the planet); and the fear that the forthcoming failure of the EU politicians, for the twentieth time (that’s not an exaggeration!), to sort out the so-called Euro crisis will (I quote) ‘panic the markets into hitherto uncharted territory’.

WHAT??  How much more of this sort of diarrhoea do they (I mean the Merkels, Osbournes and Diamonds) expect us to put up with? 

I have a modest proposal.  Shut down the capital markets, all of them, for say a fortnight.  Completely.  Worldwide.  Put all the touts on gardening leave.  And let’s see what difference it makes in the real world.  It’s not as drastic as it sounds – it seems to work on Sundays.

Maybe I'm a Rich Man?*

“Go on, you can afford it.  You’re a rich man.”

That was the second part of Rachel’s answer to my question, the first part being “Four cases of champagne.” 

She’s right, of course, I can afford it.  After all, it’s not that often you clock up a decade, is it?  And there was that unexpected tax rebate last year, when a party seemed to be the consensus.  But rich man?  Am I?  I’ve never really thought about it.

Okay, I own this house.  But I can’t spend that.  I have a few shares of various sorts; again, hardly worth cashing in for maybe 80% of what I paid for them.  And there’s some money in the bank (I think – you can’t be sure these days, can you, especially when it’s that particular bank.)   I couldn’t go down the shops and buy an executive jet or a small island (though those are going quite cheap at the moment I’m told) or a flat in the Shard.  To be truly rich, you need to be able to buy an Aston Martin, without thinking too hard about it; and then another one; and, crucially, still have more money afterwards than you had before.  If I tried a fraction of any of those things I’d be instantly poor.

I’m going off the idea anyway.  To be properly rich, you have to feel rich, look rich, behave rich.  And there’s the defences, the staff, the advisors …  It all sounds like a lot of effort.

But I can definitely run to a few bottles of fizz.  So don’t panic, I’ll get the bubbly, Rach.  And a new pair of shoes.  And maybe some diamonds to stick on the soles, just for the hell of it.

*Of course, as soon as I'd posted this I thought of a much better title, so I've changed it.  God knows what confusion this will cause. 

Hard Times

The scene: in a cobwebby ill-lit counting house in an unidentified island somewhere off the shores of Switzerland, Moody is huddled over his abacus and post-it stickers.

Moody (tallying on his fingers): RBS, Barclays, HBOS … Lloyds … er –

Enter Poor.  Moody does not look up.

Poor: I suppose you’ve already thought of Bank of America, Citi, BNP?

Moody: Do you take me for an idiot?

Poor: Of course.  I mean, of course not.

Enter Fitch, a weedy stripling.  Moody and Poor smirk condescendingly.

Fitch: Good news, sires.

Moody: Well, spit it out, boy.

Fitch: I have downgraded the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank.  (They stare enquiringly at him.)  Oh, and the IMF.

Poor (shakes his head): It’s not enough.  Have we run out of countries?

Moody: Let’s put it this way.  In order to downgrade any more countries, we will first have to upgrade them.  And that would never do.  Why, we’d lose all our credibility!

Silence.

Fitch: Um – may I make a suggestion? 

Moody: Yes?

Fitch: Well, if we’ve run out of banks and countries to downgrade –

Poor: Yes?

Fitch: Why don’t we just downgrade each other?

Silence.

Moody and Poor (to each other): Out of the mouths of …

Fitch (excited): Bags I first!

The lights go out.  Voices over:

The Markets: It’s all gone very quiet all of a sudden.  Oh dear, what do we do now? 

The Politicians: It’s all gone very quiet all of a sudden.  Oh dear, does that mean we have to do something?

Exeunt all, pursued by a dead bull and a dead bear.

The Human Race: Toodle pip.  Can we get on with it now please?

Bins Revisited

I blogged about bins last year (click the label) and there was a lively comment debate, in particular concerning regional variations in colour coding.  I felt at the time that there was more to it, and now I know I was right.

Visiting my relatives in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead on Monday, I volunteered after dinner to take a bag of rubbish out.  I knew the colours – this was landfill hence black – and there was enough twilight left to tell the three bins apart, and indeed to see the detail of them.  For some reason, possibly to do with Rioja, I lingered and looked more closely.  They were all structurally similar, as wheelie bins tend to be, but there were subtle differences.  Looking even more closely, I realised that, according to the embossed information on the lids, they had been made by three different manufacturers.  And even more intriguing (are you gripped yet?), I didn’t recognise any of the names.

When I got home on Tuesday I checked my three bins, and I was right: they were from yet another three sources.  That makes six.  Now, I’m not going to go into the economics or logistics of this, but it does strike me as curious.  If two nearly-adjoining local authorities can between them come up with six separate wheelie bin suppliers, how will this look when spread out across the whole country?   I felt momentarily queasy, as if I was scratching the surface of what might prove to be some kind of unguessed alternative reality, in which wheelie bins were secretly replicating, disguising themselves in their pursuit of world domination.   But that’s not all.

My niece from Jersey, who was over here showing off my brand new great-nephew, had recently moved house and so needed a new bin.  (In the Socialist Republic, sorry, States of Jersey they generously charge you £40 for one, by the way.)  She duly applied, and was told that there was a six week waiting list.  In Jersey.  Wondering why, she was informed: “They get stolen.”

What’s going on?

So, what exactly is a “blog”?

I was asked by a resolute technophobe.  Well, I said, it’s just a kind of diary really…

Last evening for supper to Lord P, I myself being conveyed thence in my Lord’s sumptuous barouche Mercedes, a rare honour I thought.  His Lordship however explaining that it was born of a need for the horses to be given exercise.

Many pints of fine effervescent wines from France and the Colonies being provided and quaffed, and ales of London, the discourse did become lively, dwelling on the various Tales of Brave Ulysses, this the 16^th being his Saint’s Day, and the merits of the bard Homer against the dirty knave Joyce; the debate being well balanced by virtue of none present having read either.  Though I deemed it prudent not to confess to having read the rogue Joyce’s scurrilous text two times.

To supper, where my Lady C hath caused divers CURRIES to be served with tasty Chutnies and other sweetmeats and wines of Burgundy and I know not where else, the eating of which extended to many hours.  Afterwards my Lord and some Squires withdrew to the recreation chamber, there to watch sporting antic from Eastern lands; I though unwilling to partake, being beguiled by Mistress R who did entice me into prancing a lively galliard until my legs did ache wholesomely.

By the midnight, Several Ladies having engaged in converse of a somewhat fierce domestic character, and matters Politick loudly arising amongst the menfolk, I deemed it time to withdraw, so made my thanks and excuses and was carried home by a hired hackney.

And so to bed.

Anonymous spam

Liz raised this today, and I've noticed a few others of my blogbuddies being invaded by anonymous spammer comments recently.  There are some dolts out there who think this is a good way to promote themselves or their products.

I can't really see why Blogger allows anonymous comments at all, and have asked them:
 https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/d/msg/blogger/-/ABJM0uKowKMJ

ALL the (thankfully few) anonymous comments I get are spam of one sort or the other.  I really can't see any justification at all for anonymity.  They don't allow it on G+.  Just banning it wholesale would eliminate most if not all comment spam, and harm nobody.  What do you think? 

W

A woesome attempt to get myself up the Google hit parade, obviously; but actually more a philological enquiry into this rather peculiar letter, prompted by a somewhat tired quote from Martin Amis about www being the only abbreviation that’s three times as long as its full length statement.  Everyone knew that.   

The Chambers definition of ‘W’ (as a letter – it has many intriguing roles as an abbreviation) is an evening’s read in its own right, from which I will quote just once: “The unvoiced form is written wh as in what, but most English people substitute the voiced sound in pronouncing words spelt wh, and Scottish speakers insist upon sounding hw.”  (My mother insisted upon that too, and she certainly was in no way Scottish.)

It’s a native letter in very few (thirteen, according to doubleyouikipedia) Latin languages.  Its name varies, but is pretty well always a translation of ‘double-you’.   Except when it isn’t - the ‘you’ component shifts between u and v – hence the Italian doppio-vu and French double vé, which we would translate back as ‘double-vee’, which it clearly isn’t.  (And German uses it as if it were single  ‘V’ – can’t they get anything right?)  So we, the English, seem to have invented this most useful of letters – think of a baby’s first utterance, a child’s first question, a hooligan’s howl of frustration – and yet haven’t found a proper name for it.  One is quite freely available, you know: the old English wyn,  for which I can’t find the symbol, but which is, coincidentally, derived from the OE word for ‘joy’.  God save the Kween.

Well, that’s why we are the way we are.

Massive Increase In Annual Gooseberry Crop

God Save Our Gracious Leader

 So now that the Union Jacks have been furled (or at least spray-painted to turn them into George Crosses), is it an appropriate time for the big question?   Probably not.  But then it never is: which makes me suspect that it’s not really that big after all.  So instead let’s have a bit of fun with it.

To kick off, do we need a Head of State at all?  I’m talking constitution rather than society here.  All the Queen does, in our system, is rubber-stamp legislation which we, through Parliament, have already enacted.  (As an aside, just to stir up the stew, do Acts passed by the Scottish Parliament get the Royal Assent?  I don’t know.)  So that’s not much of a role.  She could say ‘No’, but I doubt she will.  So in theory we could just eliminate that whole top tier.  But we’re not that radical, so let’s assume the answer is ‘Yes’.

Which of course raises the more important question: what’s a Head of State’s job?  There are two models here, which I can conveniently characterise as the British and the French.  Other examples of the British model are Ireland, Sweden and Spain.  Of the French one, Germany, USA and Russia.  In the first, it’s constitutionally and politically formal and neutral; in the second, it’s politically (and often even constitutionally – think of Italy) active and partisan.

I don’t think the British would want a political President.  If I’m right, and we were to go for abolishing the Monarchy, we would be choosing a constitution in which a powerless hereditary individual was replaced by a powerless elected one.  Big deal?  But then there’s the social aspect.

That’s what really matters.  Given our history, I think we’re looking at a massive culture shock.  Some will say that that’s exactly what’s needed, a good shake-up – I agree , but if we have to shake anything, let’s start with the newly sprouted leylandii and the knotweeds rather than the mature oaks.  Whatever you may feel about injustice on the broader field, carping about irreversible historic wealth and privilege is a stupid place to start.  Get over the distractions – last weekend proves that we’re more than capable of enjoying distractions - and get focussed on the real stuff.

I watched it!

I did!  Almost all of it!  Somebody had to.
What a bummer, I have to say.  At a stroke, Gary Barlow and the rest of them managed to dissipate 75% of the goodwill that yesterday's great populist pageant had engendered.  What an appallingly awful set of performances.  Not to mention That Song, so counterproductively called 'Sing' - I'd need a lot of money to be persuaded to compose anything worse.
So, just a few lowlights (and two high ones):
A kind of inverse highlight: I was terrified that Elton was going to conclude with 'Candle in the Wind'.  I really was.  Amazingly, he summoned up better taste.  That doesn't happen often.
Rolf was valiantly struggling to fill in with Maggie's favourite song, uncued and unaccompanied, and just getting the crowd going when Stevie Wonder's road crew finally managed to get set up and have the poor man hauled off mid-impro.  I imagine Stevie going "get him off NOW or I'm on my plane." 
He should have been.  He was dreadful.  He seemed to think it was her birthday, and his incomprehensible henchman addressed her as 'Your Highness'.  I mean, really.  And WTF was he doing there anyway?  Representing the Colonies or something?
Highspot #1: Madness on the roof, with some great projections onto Buck house (which the Beeb, with their customary ineptitude, managed to miss most of.)  'It Must Be Love' momentarily made me want to be there.
Macca sounded and looked over the hill.  I'd really hoped he'd end with the final track from Abbey Road, but instead he inexplicably chose to croak through 'Live and Let Die' - eh? - which contains the worst lyric even he has been able to come up with - "the changing world in which we live in".
Highspot #2: Charlie!  Didn't he do well?  For a moron who long will hopefully not reign over us.
Still, at least the beacon got lit.  They'll need it to reignite the Olympic torch.

Weekend in the Country …

… seems to be the in thing.  The country in question being Wales, in my case.

I have to say, nothing of the remotest interest happened, it rarely does, but that’s never previously stopped me telling you about it anyway.  I cut the grass on Saturday.  Well, I strimmed it first, as parts of it were knee high.  I always feel a tad guilty about disturbing the peace in this way, essential though it is; but when I stop my strimmer and hear the whine of at least four others from around the site, I’m less bothered.  My caravan neighbours down the field were obviously keen for me to stop, waving, beckoning and holding up glasses of wine in an almost-unsuccessful attempt to deter me.

Not many Union Flags in evidence, and the flotilla consisted, as I predicted, of two masochistic kayakers, a fisherman, and an intrepid water-skier in the distance off Monkstone Point.  The three extended families who rule this site, though, are having one of their barbeques tomorrow.  Any excuse – these are people who voted Plaid Cymru to a soul in 2010.  I was invited, of course, but when I woke up this morning and saw the windswept drizzle, I decided to pack up and cut for home.  I’m still partied to satiety from last week anyway.

The journey home was notable in two ways, both about rain.  It stopped raining, fully, exactly once – at Port Talbot!  This never ever happens.  Something to do with the geography means that you can be travelling along the M4 out of, and into, the driest drought in history; you reach Port Talbot, it’ll rain.  Has to be why all those famous people like Sir Anthony Hopkins got out of the place.  Not today though. 

The second thing was the cloudburst between Newbury and Reading.  It’s a stretch of that motorway surface that was designed to cope with the drainage question by causing as much water as possible to be sprayed, by each vehicle, straight up into the windscreen of the following one.  It was like driving through the outskirts of Niagara.  I turned on every light I had, tucked into lane one and slowed to thirty-five.  Unlit white vans hurtled past at eighty, their drivers doubtless swearing at the f***ing weather that was stopping them doing ninety.

Oh by the way, for any republican curmudgeons, I learn from the Guardian that the net annual cost of the monarchy to the taxpayer is £32m.  That’s fifty pee each.

I’m So Busy!

I really am.  Here’s my list for tomorrow:

Photos.  This isn’t quite what it seems.  I have to get into one of those stinking booths in the Oracle shopping centre to get two passport-type pictures of my face, both for ageing purposes.  The mandatory one is for a new driving licence, the other for a bus pass.  I can do without these reminders, to be honest.

Shoes.  I own three pairs (not including sandals and slippers).  The only ones I ever wear are now worn to below the legal tread limit.

Toilet brush.  This is for the caravan, which now has a toilet.  The need has been established.

Books and music.  Permanently on every list.

Shorts.  I seem to have thrown out my last and only pair.  That’s not strictly true, but the older ones are dysfunctional in both length and girth.

Marker pens.  As co-coordinator of the Neighbourhood Watch, I receive occasional offers from the local police (no, stop it!), the latest of which is some property-marking kits which I have to collect from the police station.  I’m trying to prepare myself for the conversation.

Strange in the Night

Big day tomorrow, so I reluctantly make my excuses and retire to my luscious accommodation.  I’m in bed and asleep by ten-thirty, which is unlike me, so it’s no surprise that I wake up at about half past three.  It’s not just that though: I’m woken by a sound.  Sounds are unusual round here.  The silence kept me awake at first.

It sounds like a dog barking.  “Who?  Who who who.”  The number of who’s varying between three and, I decide, eleven.  I discount this theory though (having rearranged the duvet several times and drunk some water), for three reasons: one, there are only two dogs within a mile of here, and they only ever bark in duet, whereas this is definitely a soloist; two, they wouldn’t be allowed; and (what was three, oh yes) it doesn’t sound anything like them. 

By now I’m interested.  It’s three forty.  I toy with other possibilities while the barking recedes, circles the house and returns.  Pigs?  Definitely not.  Birds of some sort?  Local sprites rehearsing for Walpurgis?  Wolves?  Not this far south, surely.

I get up and look out.  Obviously, it stops, and I can’t see anything except weak moonlight.  I go back to bed, and it starts again.  Then fades and stops.  Then starts.  Three.  Eleven.  Nine, was that?  Is it always an odd number?  I paraphrase Michael Frayn’s line for John Cleese: It’s not the sound, I can take the sound.  It’s the silence I can’t stand.

I decide to list the Beatles’ singles chronologically.  What was the B side of ‘Love Me Do’?  Okay, A sides only.  I get to ‘Lady Madonna’.

The sun starts to rise, the barking stops, and I go to sleep, to dream (as usual) of going back to work and losing the car.

(to be continued) 

Buzz

Do you ever hear sounds that aren’t there?  I do.  I’m not sure I should be confessing this days before meeting many of my blog buddies for the first time, but don’t worry.  At least not too much.  This only happens under very specific circumstances, to wit, just when I’m due to wake up from my early morning dream sleep.  So far, it’s either the doorbell or the alarm.  Lord knows how either of these lodged themselves that deeply in the bilges of my subconscious, or wherever it is they reside  – the alarm makes some sense (although you’d think by now twelve years of not having to get up for work would have expunged it); but the doorbell, where does that come from?  As far as I can remember, nobody has ever rung my doorbell earlier than nine a.m., except by arrangement.  It’s mysterious.

This morning, though, was an interesting variant.  It was about five-thirty when the unmistakeable buzz of a flying insect woke me.  I hadn’t even started dreaming.  And it was much too early.  And it went on after my eyes and ears were definitely open.  This was the real thing.

I’m good in a crisis.  Like a super-hero, I switched on the light, sprang out of bed and grabbed a towel.  The buzzing stopped.  But I had a fix on it: somewhere around the front curtains.  I did a forensic inspection of all areas then carefully agitated the curtains.  The buzzer wasn’t falling for that.  I lowered the towel and backed away.  It was a blink-first standoff.

It blinked first, a black buzzing dot hovering near the wardrobe.  I went into full Zen warrior mode.  One swing of the towel, and the sleepy queen wasp was squirming on the floor.  I finished it off, binned it and went back to bed.

Probably two hours later the unmistakeable buzz of a flying insect woke me.  It stopped as soon as I opened my eyes.  I waited; it didn’t come back.  It wasn’t there.  Oh well, I thought, that’s an addition to the repertoire of wake-up calls.  At least they’re all based on, or drawn from, memory, so I don’t expect herds of wildebeest in the attic.  Mustn’t get complacent though; I did once hear a Coldplay record …

Ambiguity

I failed to complete the crossword three times running.*

That was meant to be my last thought before going to sleep last night.  I eventually did go to sleep, about two hours down the road.

Once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere.  Here are a few, drawn at random, just to amuse you:

The duchess can't bear children

He saw her duck

The chicken is ready to eat

‘Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas’  (Groucho, of course).

And this great example from Thomas Pynchon: ‘We have forests full of game and hundreds of beaters who drive the animals toward the hunters such as myself who are waiting to shoot them.’

I’ve always written, but until I retired it had been mostly what I suppose I have to call ‘technical’ writing, which is to say that precision of meaning was the success criterion.  If the readers were given any opportunity to misconstrue, I’d failed.  So that kind of writing was all, and solely, about communication of facts, past or future.  I think I did it reasonably well, that avoidance of ambiguity.

Since then I’ve dabbled more in what I suppose I have to call ‘creative’ writing.  Here, ambiguity, in its broadest sense, is what you’re aiming for a lot of the time.  You want the reader to wonder just what you meant, and to react with surprised laughter.   Poetry, of course, has it as its stock in trade, but I don’t do poetry.

According to a book I’ve never read, by Sir William Empson, there are seven types.  I can think of three, which is why I’ll never be a scholar.  But it occurs to me that if that’s true then ambiguity is pretty ambiguous itself, isn’t it?  And where is the boundary with metaphor?

I think that must be the point at which I went to sleep.

* The answer of course is that’d completed it twice but not the third time, rather than that I’d failed three times. I wouldn’t have bothered to mention that, would I?

I'll do whatever is necessary

For logistical reasons, I had to park the car under the pigeon tree today.  Here's the outcome:

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.  At least, unlike David Cormorant, I know what needs to be done.

A Day In The Virtual Life

Most organisms work like this: you put in sustenance at one end, waste products come out of the other, the difference being the energy which drives the organism.  Much (though not all) of the internet operates on the inverse principle.  The input is excrement, or to be more precise, advertising.  The output is wonderful – creativity, humanity, unexpected revelations, disturbing attitudes – well, sometimes excrement too, but we can scrape that off our shoes and just be careful not to step on that spot again, can’t we?  But, as long as you use a bit of your own energy to discriminate, which isn’t that hard, most of it is sustenance.  So it worries me a bit that this cornucopia is so flimsy.

It delights me, though, that the advertising is so precisely targeted, more and more, to my life, circumstances and desires.  To demonstrate this, here is a typical day in my life:

I have to get up early, to welcome the team who are going to install the new solar panels.  I’ve paid for these using my new special credit card for people with bad debts.  I check the mail.  My claim for mis-sold PPI insurance, minus 30%, has been acknowledged, which is great (especially as I never bought any), as I’ll be able to spend the money on life insurance so that my non-existent dependents don’t lose out.  After breakfast – coffee made with water boiled up in the new kettle – I clean up using the new vacuum cleaner, then put on my new designer sandals, strap on the new designer handbag and take the new baby buggy out for a walk.  I don’t quite know why I’ve got that, as I distinctly remember ticking the ‘no children’ box on the dating site.

In the afternoon, I’m a bit tired, so I relax playing with my new genuine replica Victorian abacus.  After dinner (spam fritters) I listen to my third CD of ‘Jerry Lee Lewis’s Greatest Hits’; and so to bed.  Tomorrow – another day, yet more dreams to be fulfilled.  Early start again, off to the villa in Zakynthos. 

Disgraceful ripoff!

I bought this new computer last month and transferred my iTunes library to it.  I'd bought a bunch of songs from Apple over the years, but I now learn that I'm only allowed to play them on a maximum of five computers, of which this is the third, and then I have to buy them again.  That's like saying that I can't read a book because I took it off a different shelf.  I am fuming, and will never buy anything from that bunch of thieves again.

Caravan Comforts

Great news!  The macerating toilet has been installed!  And it works – at least, no signs of unwanted outcomes so far.  It makes a rather nice burpy sound as it digests.  Joseph said “Don’t put anything solid down there, except toilet paper and its accompaniments,” and the operating instructions bear this out:

I can identify most of them, and it’s encouraging that they remind you not to put your hand down either.

Here are the installation instructions:

At home, the weather tends to be outside, something to be excluded.  Down here, it’s inside.  I don’t mean literally, there are no leaks, but it makes itself felt.  It’s much closer, and I like that.  I like the little rocking motion when a strong gust of wind hits, and the rhythms of raindrops on the roof.  I certainly like what it does to the sea, which I can always hear and see.  Today it’s been grey-green, flecked with white, and quite loud.  It sometimes seems to be breathing, and indeed I find my pace slowing to that of the sea and the weather.

Wildlife report: I think there are three other humans here.  I waved to one of them, Gordon, when he passed with his greyhound just now, and we’ll chat tomorrow.  A flock of seabirds just wheeled over, at least a hundred, black against the sky.  They circled three times then were gone.  I couldn’t tell what species, but they seemed big enough to be gannets, though that can’t be right. 

No rabbits.  Not in season yet.

Recurring Dream

Do you have one?  I do.  Read on to find out what it is.

I usually wake up around six thirty, turn over and go back to sleep until ten past eight, knowing that there’s a dream coming.  They’re generally the usual instantly forgotten gubbish, but this morning’s was highly entertaining until the end.  I’ll summarise – the original was like a David Lynch film.

I park the car in a leafy square in Islington and make my way to my appointment, which is in a building that turns out to be my old redbrick secondary school.  There are two corridors, one on each side of the assembly hall, but I’m only allowed to use one of them.  I get redirected into the forbidden corridor, but manage to find my way to the assembly hall, which has been revamped as an open plan office space.  Sheila, who has offered me the job, explains that, whilst they really want to employ me, they don’t have a desk for me at the moment.  I protest, and she says I’ll have to talk to Rupert Murdoch, but he’s not available so Ed Balls will deal with it.

I must have walked out, because I’m now trying to find my way back to the car.  An old woman in a fleamarket gives me directions, and I get a lift from some roadworkers in their very crowded blue pickup truck.  When I reach Down Square, as it’s called, I find that it’s been turned into an excavated building site, like a china clay pit.  I remember that I’d parked the car right up on the edge, but when I get there it’s gone.  I can see some rusty cars way down in the bottom of the pit, but mine’s not among them.  This is where I say “Oh no, not that again,” and wake up.  It’s ten past eight.

The recurring dream is, of course, called ‘Losing the Car’.  It crops up every year or so.  It stems from an incident during my first honeymoon, when we’d rented a Cortina, driven it to London , parked it somewhere in Bayswater and later spent an hour combing the grid of identical streets before finding it, to one-way recriminations.  That was a mistake, which obviously went in deep.

Deficit? What deficit?

Here’s a plan, Mervyn, Gideon, guys.

Invent something.  Doesn’t matter what, just make sure it’s highly addictive to 16-24s and advertising agencies.  You can do that in your bedroom, easy, especially over a raspberry pie and a side dish of html.

Run it for a couple of years, then launch an IPO and flog it for $100bn.  Deficit, toodle pip!

Uh-oh.  Oxymoron iceberg on the port bow.  You need an idea.  And you’re a government.  Oh well. 

Rupert Bear

This is going to be pretty inconsequential.

I don’t know why, and I’m wary of delving too deep – but I was instructed the other day to write about this Rupert.  I think it was a ploy to distract me from the other one.  I don’t really have much to say on the subject, to be honest.  Comics weren’t big in our household when I was a child, and Rupert wasn’t even a character in the forbidden Beano or Dandy, never mind the permitted Eagle and Girl, neither of which as I remember were heavy on anthropomorphism.  In fact I don’t think R. B. figured in any comics at all.  It seems (from my exhaustive research, which is technically limited, like a high end BMW, by my attention span of 155 seconds per subject on Wikipedia) that he was a daily strip in the Express, which certainly never crossed the threshold. 

And yet I had no trouble picturing him.  Even before Rog kindly pointed me towards some visuals, that red sweater, those yellow and black chequered trews, that scarf and those bovver boots, it all sprang into sight.  His mates were a pretty oddly clad bunch too.  Looking at the pictures, I think they’re the Bullingdon Club in mufti – but at least they’re all clothed from neck to toe.  Unlike some of their colleagues in toonworld:

·         Bugs Bunny, Korky the Kat, Tom and Jerry are all nude, but don’t have genitals or, mostly, posterior cleavage.

·         Mickey Mouse wears shorts, sometimes with braces, but is usually topless. American abroad.  Minnie is a flapper.

·         Donald Duck and, more worryingly, Winnie the Pooh, wear tops but are naked from the waist down, reminding me of certain German tourists in Fuerteventura.

·         We won’t go into Fritz The Cat, if you don’t mind.

·         And we will draw a veil over Tinkerbell’s famous flash too.

Incidentally, the collective for bears is ‘a sleuth’, which I don’t think Rupert was.  That was Tintin, who was a human (of sorts).

Weather Forecast

Many things in the public domain are making me angry at the moment, but I don't want to rant, so instead here's the view from my landing window just after sunset this evening:

By the way, does anyone out there have a Rupert Bear annual?

Cutting Edge

An article in today’s newspaper bemoaned the paucity of new ideas from the IT world, which slightly surprised me because, as I understand it (not being a dabbler myself), there are hundreds of thousands of apps out there, claiming to do everything you’d never imagined you might need, plus some.  But on reflection, I had to agree.  New uses for saucepans, even new kinds of saucepans, but nary a new kind of pan.  The last significant invention was the smart phone, centuries ago in technology years.

Elsewhere in the same newspaper, I read about the Swiss Army Knife.  Here’s mine:

Pathetic, isn’t it?  To be fair, it’s at least forty years old.  It’s not my first one: that would have been in the late fifties.  I remember losing it at a funfair in King’s Park, then going back a couple of hours later and finding it in the grass; then losing it for good a week or two after that.  This one is mainly used, these days, for breaking into the infuriatingly impenetrable shrink-wrap that encases new CDs from HMV; but the corkscrew has been used, once, in a holiday flat in Gran Canaria when the management had failed, after repeated pleas over a whole forty-five minute period, to fill this horrific gap in the inventory.  That was when I found out how useless the Swiss Army corkscrew was.  The bottle got opened, but on our departure we noticed that the kitchen walls were being repainted.

The latest models are pretty good, though. 

You can get ones with 32Gb USB memory sticks, laser pointers to enable you to destabilise football matches, LED spotlights, MP3 players, prosthetic thumbs for iPhone tapping; surface-to-air missile launchers …  I may have made a couple of those up.  You probably get a useless corkscrew too.  And a Swiss Army squaddie to carry it around for you.

Anyway, there’s the breakthrough.  Merge the functions of an iPhone and a Swiss Army knife into one piece of kit, and you will have bridged the generation gap.  The virtual and the practical will co-exist, and we will have world peace.  Not to mention being able to extract boy scouts from horses’ hooves.

Don’t Worry

I join what seems to be the shortest queue.  It’s not moving, in fact the customer and the cashier are chatting, even though the customer’s bags are full and ready to go, and her card is an inch from the reader.  After a few moments, she looks back at us.

“Sorry, it’s my fault.” 

The cashier demurs.

“No, it’s ours actually.  Dud barcode.”

“Don’t worry,” says the lady in front of me.  “They’re open till nine this evening.”

We all now start politely looking back into the shop in the hope of spotting an official person carrying a loaf of bread.  Time passes.  I look out of the window.

“It’s stopped raining while we wait,” I observe.

“Don’t worry,” says the lady at the next checkout, over her shoulder.  “It’ll start again.”

I risk looking behind me.  There’s only one person, and he doesn’t seem particularly aware of the passage of time.  I resist the temptation to inspect the contents of his trolley and ask questions like What on earth are you going to do with all that milk?  The official shop lady appears on the horizon, holding the loaf high like an Olympic torch.  There’s an in house technical discussion, then the transaction is complete and the customer pushes her card into the slot.  I feel her pain, but I also think please, let her get it right.  She does, very coolly considering, and gives us a wry grin and a cheery wave as she departs.

The lady in front of me steps forward.  She looks at me.

“I’m a bit slow too,” she says.

“Don’t worry,” I reply.

When I get outside it’s pissing down.  Which doesn’t matter in the least.

Self-indulgence, Sloppiness and Contempt

I confess to two out of the three, occasionally.  So I’m beaten by a media mile by Channel Five.  Except that I can now drum up a measure of contempt as well, though not to match theirs.

The other evening I squinted at the listings and noticed that "The Magnificent Seven" was on.  I was feeling self-indulgent (one down), and I calculated that I could slot my pre-prepared dinner (that’s two) into one of the duller bits.  I knew there’d be advert breaks, of course, and missing the bit where the two loser characters, Harry Luck and Lee, are set up with their fatal defects so that (spoiler!) they can get killed at the end without us minding too much wouldn’t really matter.  The film is much too long, and was made at a time when Hollywood was desperately trying to salvage the Western by making it psychological, which they thought meant lots of soul-searching dialogue.  In that sense, it’s a failure; but as I say, I was feeling self-indulgent, which often means reverting to my eighteen-year-old self.  So I settled down to watch.

The first thing I noticed was that it had been cropped from its original revised Cinemascope ratio (2.35:1) to the ubiquitous 16:9 , in order to make sure the whole screen was full of picture, with no black bits top and bottom.  To put that in technical terms, the edges had been chopped off.  Luckily, this wasn’t as bad as it could have been: when this practice was first deployed back in the seventies, to sixties films in which the director had been determined to exploit the width of the letterbox to the full, sometimes all you could see was two noses talking to each other.

Just as I’d resigned myself to that piece of vandalism, after fifteen minutes the first ad break kicked in.  Well, that was a bit quick, I thought; but I’ll go and stick the dinner in to warm up.  When I got back, the ads were still going on.  I hadn’t set a timer, but it must have been at least four minutes’ worth.  Oh oh.

I went out to eat at the start of the next commercial break – the meal took about twenty minutes – and got back for the end of the following one.  By now I was too far in to jump off.  Or so I thought.

Just when Chris and the guys have been (another spoiler!) booby-trapped by Calvera into pretending to surrender their guns and leave town, so that they can do their big soul-searching bit, nod to each other and ride wordlessly back, the soundtrack started to fail.  The dialogue became less and less audible.  It didn’t matter that much, because most of the talk is over, except for the last few lines which I knew by heart anyway, and the music still sounded, well, audible.  The final multi-layered gunfight is spectacularly choreographed, ludicrously over-the-top, up there in ten compressed minutes with anything today’s CGI-enhanced wannabe directors manage in an entire movie.

Just before it began, Channel Five decided it was time for another ad break.

So well done, guys, for your valiant shot at trashing this flawed masterpiece.  You failed, as your likes do; but thanks for enabling me to give an outing to my rarely exercised power of contempt, for you.  I could never equal yours for me, of course.

How long is a piece of time?

When I tell you that I’ll be celebrating my seventieth birthday within two months, three weeks and two days from the date of this post, you will I’m sure be able to work out exactly what I mean.  You might think I could have expressed myself less abstrusely.

You might also, on reflection, ponder on the word ‘within’, as strictly speaking it means ‘up to and including’ rather than ‘on’, but that’s fine: there is nothing that says I can’t start celebrating right now, and continue to do so right up to the deadline.  Similarly, nothing prevented Abu’s lawyers from lodging their appeal days or weeks, rather than ten seconds, before the deadline laid down by the ECHR – but leave that to one side.  The issue, once you hack away the usual media obfuscation, seems to be exactly what the phrase ‘within three months’ meant, or was meant to mean, and hence when that deadline actually was.  Nobody seems to have answered that.

I know the answer.  ‘Within three months’ of 17 January 2012 means ‘by 16 April 2012’.  I can prove this in several ways, but let me offer just one.  If a three month period commences on the 17^th of the month, then a subsequent three month period must also commence on the 17^th of the month.  I rest my case.

The obvious question, of course, is: why didn’t they just say that the appeal must be lodged ‘before midnight on Monday 16^th April?’

I know the answer to that as well.  If precision of language were to become the watchword, what would lawyers be for?

I'm so organised

PAPERWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

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