Saturday, June 19, 2010

My baby’s walked back home.




Pat got back yesterday from five days in the UK. On Thursday I at last succeeded in repairing my internal hard drive. Not that the patient seems much better for the operation.

Thursday, June 17, 2010

A blast from the past.



The Posh-Boys’ Chancellor has clearly turned to the late Peter Sellers for advice on how to avoid committing himself to taking any action whatsoever about anything to do with senior bankers’ obscene bonuses.
For evidence listen to George Osborne interviewed by James Naughtie on the Today programme this morning.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Catch-22.




For some months my computer has been behaving in an increasingly erratic way. It’s now begun to crash with alarming frequency. 
   Yesterday I verified the hard drive and discovered it needed repairing. In order to do this I need to re-boot using the OS installation disk. Unfortunately, neither the computer’s internal or external DVD drives will recognise the  installation disk owing, I imagine, to the hard drive’s need for repair. 
   The forums suggest that problems with the internal DVD reader, manufactured appropriately enough by MatSHITa, are all too common. No one has found a solution. So basically I’m stuffed. At any moment the problem may become so bad as to make the computer unusable, so preventing me from updating this site. In such an eventuality, go to my  Google blog which I’m able to update vis an iPhone app.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Not just the Guardian!




On the 31st May I read an article in the Independent which revealed that the Posh-Boys’ government was considering abolishing the winter fuel allowance for ex-pats on the grounds that they all lived somewhere hot. I wrote to the editor pointing out that this wasn’t necessarily the case. I looked in the on-line edition of the paper the following day to see if my letter   had been published. It hadn’t. 
  This morning, however, I received an email from the Overseas Secretary of QEHOBS saying that he’d read the letter in yesterday’s paper so saving me from remaining ignorant of my Andy Warhol moment. 
    So having had letters published in the Guardian twice last year, and scored with the Independent this, watch out Times, Telegraph and FT: your readers, too, could  be suffering my wit and wisdom soon.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Two Romanesque churches, four real and two virtual birthday cards, and Apple WWDC.




An exciting day. Visited two magnificent Romanesque churches this morning:


Santa Maria a Pie’ di Chienti and San Claudio, and then had lunch in a Chinese restaurant. This evening Pat felt sick, and a few hours later so did I. We think re-heated rice may have been responsible.
   Had four actual birthday cards:
                           from Pat                                                                                                                from Sophy & Adam


                    from Candy & Quinn                                                                                        From Deborah
… and two virtual cards:
and
Then at 7 pm, to round off the excitement, I followed the iLounge live blog with minute by minute news of Steve Jobs introduction of the iPhone 4! 
Update 9th June:

from John and Viv



Tuesday, June 1, 2010

And death shall have no dominion.




Finally got to watch the end of Lost last night. I’m pretty sure that, like Topsy, the series ‘just growed’, the writers having no idea where it was going when they began Series One. Given that, the finale was reasonably satisfying. A couple of series ago I toyed with the idea that the island was Purgatory and I don’t think I was too far off the mark. It certainly seemed to be about redemption and showing, as Larkin put it:
Our almost instinct, almost true
What will survive of us is love.
A couple of nights before we’d watched the finale of Flash Forward. Given that the series was a dramatisation of a novel I’d expected something coherent and satisfying. It wasn’t. Looking on the web produced the answer: ABC had pulled the plug on the programme because viewing figures had plummeted by two-thirds in the States. The last episode was the finale only in name. In reality it was simply the last one to be screened. Unless someone makes the show more viewer-friendly for American audiences by rewriting the script to exclude words of more than one syllable, I guess I’ll have to read the novel to find out what finally happened.