Profusion

Wrote this yesterday, but couldn't manage to get on-line, so here it is now:

Wednesday 2 December

Went down to central Manchester yesterday for the first time on this visit and was struck, as I always am here, by the sheer volume of stuff that is easily available and the attendant havoc played on my attempts at pursuing the War on Capitalism. The big HMV store opposite the Arndale Centre is a shadow of what it used to be (in the days before downloading) but it still offers some highly tempting goodies (in terms of music CDs), enough to play havoc with hand luggage requirements and my bank account. Manfully resisted most temptations though. I must say, I don’t really have a problem not buying from the astonishing range of DVDs available – we haven’t viewed all the ones we brought back last year yet. The number of television series available here, both U.S. and U.K. is staggering and makes me wonder who can find the time to watch them all. It’s being so overwhelmed that curiously takes away whatever appetite I might have for this stuff.

Another problem area is the Waterstones Bookshop on Deansgate. This hasn’t suffered any decline I can see in terms of the competition from the on-line purchase of books and e-books (I’m getting more and more intrigued by what I read about the Kindle); if anything the poetry section – the measure of any bookshop – is better than ever. I had serious difficulty in ensuring I didn’t decide that some twenty books there alone simply had to be bought.

And then at Mum’s, in the evening, we caught an episode, a repeat I assume, of one of those brilliant BBC plus David Attenborough documentaries from a series called simply Life. It was about what goes on in the oceans and there was nothing simple about life down there. Several moments were so stunning you couldn’t help but wonder if it had been faked using that clever CGI technology (is that the right acronym?) at the behest of some incredibly and dubiously imaginative designer. But no, it’s the real thing and generously available to us before we wreck the world. The bit with the massive fried egg jellyfish making a meal of a shoal of smaller jellyfish managed to be both utterly gruesome and compellingly beautiful at one and the same time.