RosieBell

Dashed hopes

Two things last week on the poignancy of happy expectations being crushed.

1. The last scene of Henry IV Part II. I saw the Royal Shakespeare's Company version beamed live at the cinema, with Antony Sher playing Falstaff. It's a melancholy play anyway, about sickness and mortality, but Falstaff takes on a new lease of life on hearing that his glamorous young friend, the Prince of Wales, has finally become king. Then comes the procession. and Falstaff greets the new Henry V-

FALSTAFF.
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING.
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

Falstaff and Prince Hal in happier times

Antony Sher took a long while to turn round to show his face, so the audience had time to dread the disappointment in it.

The second was this cartoon of the Set Text welcoming its readers:-

English academics on Twitter found their hearts breaking when they saw that.

Home at last

On Boxing Day last year pipes in the upstairs flat burst and torrents of water at full mains pressure poured into my bedroom.   

I had dragged in wheelie bins to catch the water - they would fill in a few minutes

My insurance policy covered for alternative accommodation, and so my flatmate and I have lived in two different flats in Edinburgh.

Work couldn't start on my flat until the upstairs flat was finished, which was the end of July.  My flat was dried out with dehumidifiers and then work started on it at the beginning of October.

Today, just over 10 months since the initial disaster, my flatmate and  I finally moved back home.

Thought for the day

It would cost you less grief to turn a cyclist into a boyfriend than a boyfriend into a cyclist. Holds for many things really. One of the reluctant cyclists in my past could find and replace "cyclist" and "boyfriend" with "jazz lover" and "girlfriend".

The problem with holidays. . .

The problem with holidays is that they are so much nicer than work that works feels five times as bad when you return to it.  Holidays sensitise you to how unpleasant it is to spend the best part of five days a week being somewhere and doing things that no sane being would do except for the money.  It takes a fortnight or so for me to get into the mood of numb acceptance that makes work endurable.

Everyone acknowledges this with their facetious:- "Glad to be back at work?"

Holidays should end with a hideous ordeal - being kidnapped by Somalian pirates, say, or interrogation by the Syrian police, so that work will seem like a haven of normality, and you might kiss your desk and computer when you see them again.  "Return to work easing" it could be called.

 

Gap fortnight

I'm away for a couple of weeks.

Premature burial

Photographic evidence of my death is not to be trusted:-

I quite like the headstone design though they got the initials of my parents wrong.

In codpieces we trust

UK troops will be provided with armoured underwear for pelvic protection to offer protection from pressure-plate improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and bombs in Afghanistan.

The combat codpiece is made of special ballistic material crafted from silk and synthetics, and is ultra-lightweight as well as capable of stopping or mitigating the effects of a blast.

Based on the armour technology used by Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors in the 13th century, the codpiece could also be implemented by the US and other Nato forces.

About time, if Ghenghis Khan’s squaddies were issued with such items of protection.  It’s not as if British soldiers have only just got round to fearing injury to the male apparatus:-

From a soldier’s account of marching through Normandy after D-Day:-

At night there was much air activity.  I mention this only to record an interesting psychological consensus.  Like my colleagues I slept in a small individual canvas tent, near a slit trench in which it was considered bad form to take shelter.  Nor was there more than minimal danger, though my own side did get quite near killing me with an unexploded anti-aircraft shell.  But the noise was immense at times.  I found myself lying on my back in my camp-bed with my tin hat, supposedly proof against shrapnel, on my head.  After a couple of minutes’ thought I would transfer the hat to the area that included my genitals.  A couple of minutes’ more thought, and the hat was back on my head.  Still more thought - back down to the balls.  Yet more thought. . . At some stage I would get fed up with the fandango and fall asleep.  Coyly mentioning it one morning at breakfast in the Mess tent as a possibly amusing quirk, I was greeted with a roar of agreement, sympathy, relief - “Thank God somebody’s said it at last!”  All my brother officers without exception regularly went through the same routine.

Memoirs by Kingsley Amis

Colour Red

I like this poster:-

I was sick and ye visited me

I visited a friend in hospital.  He's a bit confused.  The first thing he says to me is:- "Are they setting the clocks?" 

"What clocks?" 

"I Want to see if time is watching time pass."

He goes on, in a low voice.  "I sit here and count things. Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all."

I join in, "Playing solitaire till one, with a deck of fifty one."

"Thirty one."

"No, fifty one.  There are fifty two cards in a pack, so you're one short."

"I dreamed that the Ramones were on a plane to Melbourne."

"It would have to be a tribute plane," I said.

The conversation went on. part Ivor Cutler, part Samuel Beckett. 

"What kind of ward is this?" I asked.

"A zombie ward.  Everyone's a zombie.  You can see their fixed staring eyes."

Photo Poster

I liked this photo of a poster for a reading by my brother-in-law, John Lyall:-