On an ancient gravestone,  Clunie churchyard.  'Set thy House in order for thou shalt Die and not Live.'

Two of my favourite book illustrations

from Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows, illustrated by EH Shepard

from The Gashleycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey

Paris Review - The Admonitory Hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby, Edward Gorey

A lovely piece by Edward Gorey.  Paris Review - The Admonitory Hippopotamus: or, Angelica and Sneezby, Edward Gorey

Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today

From January 9th.  Simone de Beauvoir Would Have Been 106 Today



Reminds me to re-read The Woman Destroyed and She Came to Stay.  I'm currently reading Iris Murdoch's The Sandcastle - similar theme to She Came to Stay, but not nearly so 'astringent'. As I recall, at any rate.  It's been twenty years or more since I read it.  Jealousies and emotional threat and all manner of insecurities.  Middle class intellectuals do them so well.  The rest of us have to either ignore them or repress them or suppress them with medication (prescribed or otherwise) and pretend we have wonderful lives while we get on with earning a living, cleaning the toilet and doing the shopping.



Then we go berserk and kill ourselves and/or whoever else looks at us the wrong way on a dull Wednesday.



Or perhaps we only dream about that while we wait for some ghastly disease to finish us off.



Ah, happy days.

Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier (7/9) Movie CLIP - Approach to Sha Ka Re...

There will always be something magical about Star Trek (original), for me.

Link to article about Tolkein

I am a Lord of the Rings fan.  I didn't read it until I was about twelve or thirteen, and I read The Hobbit, after that.  I also love Wind in the Willows.  I can't really be bothered to explain why, so here is a link to a lengthy article (which actually I haven't quite finished reading!) in the London Review of Books by someone who, I think, feels similarly.  Germaine Greer apparently described LOTR as her 'nightmare'.  I don't think I'd get along very well with her.

People go on about the elves.  The elves are not the point.  If you don't understand that, then you won't like the book.  #thatisall 

 ‘I am in fact a hobbit,’ Tolkien wrote once,

in all but size. I like gardens, trees and unmechanised farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.'

He sounds like my kind of person.

I liked the Lord of the Rings films by the way, hugely, but I do not like the Hobbit ones, at all.

Ambitions of Age #1. The Road... is Everlong...

I was half-watching a programme on BBC4 about the A303 when the presenter mentioned a quote from Hilaire Belloc's 1923 book, The Road.  It appealed to me tremendously and I looked it up immediately.  Ah, the miracle of the internet.  Within a couple of clicks I had ordered the book from Amazon (yes,  I know...)

"There are primal things which move us. Fire has the character of a free companion that has travelled with us from the first exile; only to see a fire, whether he need it or no, comforts every man. Again, to hear two voices outside at night after a silence, even in crowded cities, transforms the mind. A Roof also, large and mothering, satisfies us here in the north much more than modern necessity can explain; so we built in the beginning: the only way to carry off our rains and to bear the weight of our winter snows. A Tower far off arrests a man’s eye always: it is more than a break in the sky-line; it is an enemy’s watch or the rallying of a defence to whose aid we are summoned. Nor are these emotions a memory or a reversion only as one crude theory might pretend; we craved these things - the camp, the refuge, the sentinels in the dark, the hearth - before we made them; they are part of our human manner, and when this civilisation has perished they will reappear.
"Of these primal things the least obvious but the most important is The Road. It does not strike the sense as do those others I have mentioned; we are slow to feel its influence. We take it so much for granted that its original meaning escapes us. Men, indeed, whose pleasure it is perpetually to explore even their own country on foot, and to whom its every phase of climate is delightful, receive, somewhat tardily, the spirit of The Road. They feel a meaning in it; it grows to suggest the towns upon it, it explains its own vagaries, and it gives a unity to all that has arisen along its way. But for the mass The Road is silent; it is the humblest and the most subtle, but, as I have said, the greatest and most original of the spells which we inherit from the earliest of our race. It was the most imperative and the first of our necessities. It is older than building and than wells; before we were quite men we knew it, for the animals still have it to-day; they seek their food and their drinking-places, and, as I believe, their assemblies, by known tracks which they have made."

One of my long-held ambitions is to follow one of the ancient pilgrims' roads.  There's something about travelling slowly, and walking.  It's good for the soul.  Perhaps travelling in a fast car or high speed train is also good for the soul.  But it's different. Obviously.  A bit like the difference between looking in a real library, or in a real bookshop, perhaps even travelling to a different town or city to find a certain book or bookshop, as I used to do when young; and finding and ordering a book within thirty seconds of hearing about it....

Graham Chapman interviewed on Grampian TV 1987

Graham Chapman comes across as really charming (I'm not being sarcastic). He's my favourite Python, along with Michael Palin.  No idea what happened to the interviewer. Style very much 'high 80s', I'm afraid.  Shudder.

Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir

Fascinating stuff.  Subtitles are pretty bad though.

Roots of Blues -- Blind Boy Fuller „Pistol Slapper Blues"

Mulligan and O'hare 1

Question of the day - the answer.

Oh - I forgot.  The answer to the previous question, viz. 'why is fruit round?' is, quite frankly - although why I'd want to be anything other than frank about fruit, and why I feel I even have to introduce an element of doubt, is a moot point - 'I don't know.'

Question of the Day - why is fruit round?

It isn't all round.  I know that,  of course I do - I'm not thick.  *Neither have I been living in a cupboard in John o' Groats since World War Two.  *Nor have I been living since birth in a hut in darkest Antarctica.  *Or on the Moon.  I wasn't raised by wolves in the wilds of Siberia.  *Or anywhere else where they don't have fruit.  I know about bananas and pears, and probably other non-round fruit that I can't quite think of at the moment,  and I am putting it out there before anyone starts.

However, the fact remains that most fruit is round.  Apples, oranges, grapefruit,  Sharon fruit, kiwi fruit (yes, oval I know, but basically that IS round), grapes (again, an elongated form of round, but still round-ish),  lemons (same), tomatoes (controversial), pomegranates, blueberries, strawberries (sort of round) - I could go on, but won't.

*I do realise - because I'm not thick, right? - that I've made mistakes slash errors with my nors ors and neithers.  But right now I have a life to live, a cup of tea to make, a biscuit to dunk, the toilet to go to, nails to file, nose hairs to pluck - and I cannot be arsed looking up the correct grammatical 'usages' or 'use', even, and so for the moment at least they must stay as they are.  Imperfect - like non-round fruit.

Tomorrow's question - linked.  Why are raspberries hollow?

Toilet Paper Soaked in Arsenic Klaxon

'OKAY OKAY OKAY WHAT'S GOING OOOOOON???'

'Nothing's going on.  It's all going OFF.'

'How d'you mean?'

'I don't know.'

'You must know.  And if you don't know,  I must find out.  I won't sleep unless I do.'

'You're such a control freak.'

'I know.'

'You know it all, don't you.'

'That didn't sound like a question.'

'It wasn't.'

'Ah.  It was a Statement of Fact.  And rightly so.'

'I HATE when you say 'ah'.  Sounds like you're sitting there with your arms folded, in your leather wing-backed chair...'

'Going aaaahhhhh.'

'Going aaaaaahhhhhh.  Counting your metaphorical chickens.'

'I don't need to count them.  They hatched last week.'

'I seriously doubt that.  Anyway.'

'Anyway.'

'Anyway.'

'Anyway what?'

'I hate it when you say ah.'

'Just as well you're not a doctor then.'

'One day I will kill you.  You should know that.'

'Why?  That is not at all the kind of thing I want to know.  Besides, you haven't the stomach for it.'

'Stomachs don't come into it.'

'That's what you think.  You're too stupid, anyway.  You've just proved it by informing me in advance of your murderous plan.'

'No I haven't.  I haven't said how I'm going to do it. Or when.  For all you know I've been planning this for months.'

'I bet you haven't.'

'Yes I have.  I've been soaking your toilet paper in a clear, odourless arsenic solution, then carefully drying it out and replacing it on the roll so's you wouldn't notice.  Each time you've gone to the lav or blown your nose, you've been absorbing arsenic via the mucous membranes of whichever orifice has been wiped.  And I've been rubbing my hands with glee - which is not a type of soap by the way.  Your body, according to my rigorous calculations, must now have reached total arsenic saturation point, or T.A.S.P..  So there.  And before you ask - I can see your mouth opening and I know just what's going to come out - I have a separate roll, so I remain quite unaffected.  You however will die a truly horrid death at some point within the next twenty six hours and fifty two minutes.'

'I won't.'

'Yes, you will.  You smug git.  There's no point arguing the toss.  It's too late.'

'No it's not.'

'It is.'

'It's not.  I swapped the rolls.'

'Oh...........'

'Oh indeed.  Or as I prefer to say, ah.  You now have twenty six hours and forty eight minutes to plan your funeral and make a few last phone-calls.'

'Jeeeeez...........'

'Quite.  Cigarette?'

'Might as well.  Nothing to lose now, have I?  Holy lavatory paper.  I didn't see that one coming.'

'Course you didn't.'

'You're not pulling my leg, by any chance? Or indeed, 'yanking my chain'?'

'No.'

Gram Parsons - Return Of The Grievous Angel

Haven't posted any Gram Parsons for AGES.  My day doesn't go well unless I listen to this.