April 22nd - April 28th 2002
Sunday Nice hands
Saturday Burn baby
Friday Perv swoops
Thursday Pregnant seahorses
Wednesday Pedestrian gaping
Tuesday RIP
Monday TV Ulrika
Sunday 28th April 2002
Oooh, haven't you got nice hands!
- said an otherwise anonymous friend of Malcolm's when introduced to me at the Vauxhall Tavern on Saturday, which we attended as part of David's extended birthday celebrations (of which more, much more, no doubt, later.)
Saturday 27th April 2002
Don't worry, I won't burn you.
- said the dentist to me yesterday, as he lit the blowtorch.
Friday 26th April 2002
So ok, your first reaction on reading this story may not have been "Golly, paedophile is such a long word."
And you might not have paused to sympathise with sub-editors who have to find a way of working it into a column that's less than two inches wide.
But even you wouldn't have gone this far.
Or would you?
Thursday 25th April 2002
Interesting over the top reactions to David Blunkett's mildly-unfortunate use of the verb swamp to describe the potential impact of the children of asylum-seekers on local schools.
Simon Hughes said "If suddenly a housing estate is built in a village and a large number of extra children come, you don't describe these children as swamping the village school" - leaving hanging the question of whether the families on the housing estate are likely to be drawn from non-native cultures or speak English only as a second language, if that.
And Diane Abbott, my Tower Hamlets MP, confirms her decidely urban outlook by adding "We are talking about children here, not raw sewage", a remark that you might feel speaks more to the housing conditions in East London than it does to her knowledge of rural geography...
"Weird Nature, 8:30 tonight, BBC1. We humans are not alone in our addiction to intoxicating substances. The green vervet monkeys on the Caribbean island of St Kitts for example, have developed a taste for the fermenting sugar cane used in the manufacture of rum..."
(Seems to me we've heard about those green velvet monkeys somewhere else lately?)
Although I wouldn't dream of sitting down to watch Weird Nature in the evening, I sometimes catch it repeated in the early hours as the TV burbles on beside my computer.
These re-runs have the bonus of a superimposed signer, gesticulating her way through the commentary for the hard-of-hearing, a particular joy in last night's programme about weird animal sex - where I especially enjoyed her portrayal of a pregnant sea-horse.
Drunken monkeys shouldn't be too much of a challenge.
Wednesday 24th April 2002
I think Meg would like Francis Spufford's new book The Child That Books Built in which he writes, not so much about children's books as about what it is to be a child who reads.
By the time I reached The Hobbit's last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster until it reached me at the speed of light and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts.
Thomas Jones's (sadly not on-line) review of the book from the current issue of the LRB talks about an author that Spufford, Meg and I had in common:
He credits E. Nesbit with inventing 'the mixing of worlds' in The Story of the Amulet (1906), the third of her novels about Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane and their magical adventures.
The first is Five Children and It (1902) - the fifth child being their baby brother, 'It' being the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day and hates getting wet.
In The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the children discover a flying carpet that can take them anywhere in the world: the daily allowance is three wishes. The phoenix, like the Psammead, is of an awkward but basically good-natured disposition, and makes up for what the carpet lacks in personality.
Fished from that same issue of the LRB, that memorable thing, a line of Henry James's prose that not only doesn't want to make you gnaw the carpet in a rage at its impenetrability but actually stands some chance of staying with you:
Pedestrian gaping having been in childhood prevailingly my line... my sole and single form of athletics.
Tuesday 23rd April 2002
I am a fat, bald homosexual - not ideal television material at all.
Monday 22nd April 2002
The world and his wife are already sick to death of hearing about the rumoured affair between the England manager and a sultry Swedish weathergirl.
But yesterday's headline from the Sunday People piqued even my jaded interest.
Who knew? She's so convincing!
......previous entries