Talk To Rex

I dreamt that there was a national referendum to decide whether Hazel Blears should become Deputy PM. I was voting in a tiny cafe in London, where I sat drinking coffee and deliberating over my decision whilst being joined by a succession of people I knew but was trying to avoid because they all wanted to sleep with me. But I remained calm and witty, and remember saying to everyone I met “I don’t want to vote for Hazel Blears, but who else is there??”

When I finally came to vote, the cafe owner was clearing away the voting slips and said I couldn’t – but I’d been waiting there all day so pushed for my right to get my vote in. At which point I woke up so will never know what happened next.

Thankfully I don’t have a niece called Maddy, nor a set of golf clubs.

I’ll say one thing for the last train back to Cambridge on a Sunday evening via Hertford North, Hoxton and Cornwall…

…you sure as hell get a lot of essays marked.

So I’m largely moved into my new flat, and in the process am having (as usual when I move) great fun with poor television reception. When I moved to Cirencester, I could only reliably receive BBC 2; when I moved to the last house in Cambridge, Channel 5 showed strong but BBC 1 was dodgy. And so forth.

In my new flat I can get BBC 1.

Nothing else; that’s it. And it’s not very good reception. Actually, it’s not quite that straightforward – on Thursday evening I got pretty good BBC 2 and Channel 5, poor ITV and C4, and almost non-existent BBC 1. Since I’m supposed to get good coverage for FreeView, and Channel 5 always used to be the yardstick for FreeView capability, I went out and bought a tiny and ugly black box, at which point everything turned around so I could get BBC 1 through normal broadcast, and the FreeView box was able to detect everything else, but solidly refuses to show anything except Sky News.

My flat is clearly trying to introduce an unwanted bias into my news consumption.

I don’t really have anything against Sky News (except for grammar, spelling, clarity, research and use of the English language); bias is a part of life, and should be embraced on all sides. I was planning to do this with, say, BBC News 24 plus some healthy website reading: a bit of Al Jazeera, some CNN, Press Association video feeds, that sort of thing. Except I can’t receive BBC News 24 (FreeView is trying to pick it up from Alexandra Palace, which I always associate with a computer game in the late 80s for some reason), and I don’t have an internet connection yet.

It’s a little difficult to be embraced on all sides by bias when you only have Sky News.

The cynic in me wants to claim this makes me feel like an American. The realist accepts that I can’t get good enough steak for that.

Book training for scroll users (from a Norwegian comedy show).

While cleaning out the house, I discovered two empty bottles of wine. Presumably I saved the bottles in lieu of bothering to write down that I liked them, but as I wanted to throw them into the recycling box, I had to write them down somewhere – they went into a calendar entry on work’s email system, but that’s being turned off today. So I’ll put them here instead, on the basis that even if this blog disappears at some point, the contents will remain in Grandfather Google for all eternity.

They were a Rioja called Faustino V, which I do actually remember being rather nice (and so not saved for historical reasons because it wiped out an African tribe or something), and a Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Chateau Mont-Redon, which I remember nothing about but seems to be rated highly.

My latest excuse for being silent here is that I’ve been moving house, from the ivory towers of Cambridge to the gas towers of North Greenwich. (Okay so Cambridge’s towers are few and resolutely stone, but it’s been some years since gas was processed on the Greenwich Peninsula either.)

I am now largely settled into my new flat, but today I returned to Cambridge to clean. I hadn’t realised quite how many plastic bottles there were hiding in cupboards, nor cardboard boxes lurking beneath the stairs; these all have been found temporary homes in appropriate bins, leaving me to get down to serious hoovering, dusting and other ways of ousting spiders.

The thing is, I just can’t bring myself to hoover the buggers up. Firstly, I figure it’s a little unfair to pick on them simply because they’re much smaller and have an insufficient amount of friction compared to the sucking power of my Dyson. Secondly, they scare the hell out of me. It’s not the eight legs (I don’t find The Corrs scary), and it’s probably not the furry legs (I don’t find Ray Mears scary). Cooms was pretty frightening, so maybe it’s the compressible legs. I can’t really imagine it’s anything other than the legs, although they have weird eyes, and Elton John is a bit frightening at times.

So anyway a large part of the afternoon consisted of hoovering up a bit of web, waiting for the spider to move on, then hoovering up some more. Oh, and cussing – because when they move they lay more web, like some organic silk railroad machine.

As it turned out, the cussing was good practice, because the trains back to London tonight are awkward, and full of annoying people talking loudly about Britney Spears.

So the man paid for sex. Yes, a lot of us find that morally dubious, but a high moral standing has never been a necessary qualification for any chief executive of BP.

And yes, he lied under oath. But then, Clinton proved that you can be the most powerful leader in the world and get away with that.

So when Lord Browne is described as “disgraced”, the word is essentially being used in its traditional meaning, viz. “homosexual”.

To some extent it’s a self-imposed disgrace – he’s the one who resigned, when he could have done a George Michael-style chat with Richard and Judy and got it all out into the open. But I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet that if it had been a classy call girl rather than a rent boy exposing him, he’d probably still have his job.

Sigh. Browne may not be doing two years’ hard labour, but a lot of things haven’t changed since Oscar Wilde’s day. Elton John aside, everyone hates gays.

A couple of nights ago I was trying to get to sleep when I realised that I couldn’t remember how old I am. The only way I could find out was to calculate it from my date of birth, and even then I wasn’t entirely convinced by my maths – and indeed remained uncertain of my age for the next two days, until a friend told me the answer.

Old age surely begins this way…

Last night I dreamt that I went to see Don Giovanni, full of excitement at going to a favourite opera I have never seen staged.

But it started with recititive and I thought “that’s odd, they’ve decided to cut the overture” – then as it went on I discovered that it was in fact Handel’s Don Giovanni and it was all recititive.

I’m guessing this might be the kind of nightmare that only makes sense if you’re familiar with Handel’s operas…