where art collides philosoperontap

The toast pops up and I spring into action. Not quite the same as the whistle going and me climbing over the parapet to go into the line. Actually nothing like it at all so the analogy isn’t a particularly good one. The toast has been buttered and consumed in rapid order. We are off out for a Saturday night in Newark to watch a popular music concert. Madness you say, knowing what home loving types we are. Yes indeed Madness I say. Night Boat to Cairo, Baggy Trousers, Embarrassment etcetera etcetera etcetera.

I do like Madness though when I last saw them which must have been five years ago in Brum I remember saying to one of my pals “the didn’t do Come on Eileen. It’s one of my faves”. Course turns out Eileen was not a Madness song it was Dexys Midnight Runners. It’s a mistake anyone could have made. I made it. Haha. Hah. Wouldjabelieveit!

Next day and it’s my day, apparently. Father’s day. Not my birthday. I got a card from my daughter in Durham. Very nice. She sent it a month ago. Nothing like making sure it gets there in time. How often do you wake up realising it’s your little nephew Johnny’s birthday tomorrow and have to rush out and buy him a last minute card and hope it gets there in time.

Doesn’t happen in our house. Anne is super organised like that. If it was left to me it would happen every time. Years and years ago I bought a job lot of Happy Birthday Father cards from a closing down sale at a stationers shop. There were seven identical cards with the same picture of a red car on the front. My dad got the same card seven years running. Not sure if he ever noticedJ It amused me.

I do the writing of cards in our house. Something a bit more than “hope you have a great day, love xxx”. I can’t be more specific than that because every message is different. Tailored towards its recipient. The biggest problem I have with writing messages in cards is my handwriting. My handwriting is terrible and has grown steadily worse since computers arrived on the scene which is quite a long time ago now.

Word processors have killed off the art of handwriting. It occurs to me that there could be a typed equivalent of your handwriting becoming more of a scrawl as you get older and that is the number of typing errors you make increases. Doesn’t mean to say these errors are visible to the reader thanks to the power of the spellchecker. Means it takes longer to type though. I type pretty fast but sometimes find myself going over stuff and correcting it which is the bit that takes the time really.

Still I prefer typing to handwriting. My hand always used to get tired as I recall. Now I just get RSI! I went through a phase of having to use the mouse with my left hand because my right wrist got sore doing it. Seemed to have phased that one out and am back on the right hand now though half the time I use the pad on the laptop instead of the mouse.

Must have been a real pain in the old days when people used typewriters. The old fashioned ones with the levers that swing over and bashed the paper when you tapped a key. I can picture them now. A lone author hunched over his desk tapping away long into the night. A pile of scrunched up paper overflowing from the waste paper basket at the side of his desk. Several coffee cups on the table, all with some cold dregs in them.

I could add an ashtray into the scene. It would be authentic. The thought of the smell makes me feel sick though so I won’t. Especially as the pile of cigarette stubs grows.  You won’t find no pile of cigarette stubs in an ashtray in this house nosiree. Don’t even think we have an ashtray. Anyone daft enough to want to smoke has to go out into the garden.

The other thing that isn’t used a lot in this house is the sugar. Sure we use icing sugar and castor sugar in baking but the granulated stuff that goes in tea and coffee doesn’t get used. In the past whenever we’ve had some building work doing it’s been interesting to see how quickly the sugar goes down compared to normal. When I was a kid I’d have a couple of sugars in a milky coffee but at some stage of the game I weaned myself off it. Did it gradually by cutting down the amount I was using and eventually it went completely. Now the idea of sugar in tea or coffee makes me shudder a little although I have been known to stick a little in a latte if the coffee has been on the bitter side. Cue advert with woman smarting at bitterness of her coffee when a bloke arrives shaking coffee beans in one hand and holding a jar of Nescafe in the other. Might have been some other brand of cawfee but the concept is there.

On the subject of adverts I remember the time when I was a kid there was a strike on tv. Not sure if it was a ban on adverts or what but I do remember that when normal service was resumed I seemed to think that the adverts were more entertaining than the programmes they cut into. Probably have bigger budgets. Nowadays adverts are a pain in the arse. Not that I’m a big TV watcher but there are one or two compelling shows like Timewatch (yawn say the kids) and Storage Hunters (yippee say the kids).

I’m in to things like Timewatch even though there can be long stretches where very little happens and even when something does happen it’s usually just someone finding a tiny fragment of a bowl at which point a team of experts hurriedly gathers around to pronounce it early twelfth century or late 11^th but not the circa 800AD that they had been looking for.

Storage Hunters is so bad it’s compelling. Yesterday I switched the box on in the middle of the day to see if there was any sport and found to my huge joy that SH was on. Imagine my disappointment when I found that I’d already seen it 🙂

3rd Law Part 43 here

3rd Law Part 45 here