The end of the beginning.

As Churchill famously remarked in connection with Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel: ‘… this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Yesterday I sent Monica Bruni, a local estate agent, details of our house, with a view to obtaining a rough estimate of its current market value. I have no wish to live in England again, especially in the Fens. I find myself increasingly out of sympathy with the UK’s zeitgeist: its Little Englander euroscepticism, its tolerance of the ill-mannered and overweight yobs who crowd its streets, its eager adoption of the values of the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail, and consequent failure to see where the interests of the vast majority of its inhabitants lie and who their real enemies are. On the other hand we have friends and family there and could possibly be useful to the latter for a few years. And given the terrible economic outlook which the UK faces owing to the bankers’ Gordon Brown’s [redacted by Cleggeroon  Undercover Net Total Surveillance*] criminal irresponsibility we may have to provide Candy with more support than occasional baby-sitting.

   In theory, we haven’t committed ourselves to selling, merely to seeing what we could realise if we did. However, I feel that it’s like one of those relationships where people are considering a trial separation. One knows that despite protestations to the contrary it won’t be long before one of them is screwing someone else - if indeed one of them hasn’t been doing so secretly for some time already. I see the downhill path stretched out before me: the Sibillini dissolve into the monotonous Fens, the palazzo shrinks into some dreary rabbit-hutch. For a few brief years we enjoy being close to our family and friends, and then, as physical and mental decrepitude gallop on apace, a living death incarcerated in some god-awful gerryhome surrounded by the stench of our own incontinence.That’s the end -  but I fear it’s beginning now.

*A wholly-owned subsidiary of  The Big Society©, a member of the NewsCorp group.


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Death Sentence*.

Yesterday I reached another milestone on the road to corporeal dissolution, speeded on my journey by the vast numbers of cigars I’d smoked, and the immoderate quantities of wine and brandy I’d drunk while Matt and Charlie were here. They arrived on Friday and went on Monday evening. I thoroughly enjoyed their stay.

 Not only am I rapidly running out of time, but Steve Jobs’s failure to mention on Monday what will happen to iDisk once Mobile Me is replaced by iCloud, suggests that iWeb’s days are likewise numbered. The computer press is unperturbed by this believing that Facebook and Twitter have made it redundant. This may be true for the acne generation, for the semi-literate who find 140 characters more than sufficient to express their half-baked ‘ideas’, and for the super-egoists who broadcast their every bowel movement to their moronic ‘followers’. But for us simple narcissists, who like to hone a phrase even though we know it’s purely for self-consumption, the death of iWeb will be a tragedy.

  On a brighter note this year’s card count is up: five* actual cards (plus an e card) including one each from three of my four surviving children: Eccoli:

Pat

  Sophy & Adam 

1. 

  Candy & Quinn

 Matt & Charlie

  Chris

*Stop Press: a sixth card, from Debbie, arrived  9th June

And an e-card from Maggie & Phil.


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