Finally

A tough day at work (but, then, which day isn't?) made bearable by the good news out of Old Trafford. Moscow here we come!

The Heat Is On

The last week or so has seen temperatures rising here. Not by a substantial amount - it's always what the English would regard as hot (and sticky). But a couple of degrees makes a lot of difference in the hot and sticky stakes.

My test for how hot it's going to be is simple. As I leave the apartment at 6.05 in the morning if Noi says There's perspiration on your shirt a clammy day is guaranteed.

The advantage I have over most people in Singapore is that I actually like the heat. Certainly it can be uncomfortable, and quite headachy, but, trust me, anything is better than winter in the north of England.

Lost

Over the last couple of weeks I've lost the tops of two of the cheap black biros I use at work and over the weekend I mislaid an entire pen. In the great scheme of things this may not count for much, but it's this kind of thing that makes me wonder if I'm fraying at the edges. I'm not terribly worried if I am. I quite like the kind of carpet that's showing its age - we've got one under our favourite coffee table that's losing all definition and I'd be loathe to fix it. So if I don't get fixed I suppose, by analogy, I can put up with that.

But I wouldn't mind finding the pen tops. I keep marking my fingers with black ink, summoning memories of how incredibly, unhygienically, scruffy I was at school.

Bouncing Back

Nothing if not resilient, I put the pains of Stamford Bridge behind me long enough to celebrate yet another birthday in jovial style this morning. The jollity came aided and abetted by no less than two cards from Noi (something of a tradition in our household) and a present from her of my first ever full length audio book.

The book in question is Patrick O'Brian's Master & Commander. Since I cannot think of much better to do in life than lose myself in an Aubrey/Maturin novel, it seemed to make sense to see if a full 15 CD reading can fit somewhere into my routines. (I'm thinking of listening in the car.)

This morning things got off to the best possible start with the magical meeting for the first time of our protagonists at the fateful (and hilarious) concert on Gibraltar. What's so remarkable about this is that O'Brian seems utterly certain about where the relationship is going from the beginning. The writing manages to be broad yet extraordinarily subtle at one and the same time.

And in the evening I found myself serenaded at the piano by my niece to make it a musical Happy Birthday to remember.

Changing

I've not been listening much to music over the last three weeks despite having reasonable opportunities to do so. I don’t why, but there it is. A fallow period.

The only place I've really been focusing on groovy sounds has been in the car and the CDs installed in the changer have been there for that period, only now being replaced. So this is what has engaged me recently: first off - Arctic Monkeys' first album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. I suppose this is my way of attempting to stay young and a very jolly way it is. Following that Robert Fripp's Exposure (the 2006 version), with CD2 being the one of the set that stayed longest in the changer. Then it's been The Complete A and B Sides 1963 - 1970 of Dusty Springfield. And after that Paul McCartney's Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. And finally Nightmoves from Kurt Elling.

There's something about the arbitrariness of the list I like, a kind of pleasing messiness. I'll let that speak for itself. A good way to stay old.

Musing

I've been dipping into Stephen Fry's The Ode Last Travelled over the last week or so with much pleasure and some profit. I thought I'd had a generally traditional sort of education in literary matters but he sometimes uses terms I've never come across (or particularly noticed) before. It turns out that 'rich rhyme' is what you call it when a writer uses full rhymes on homophones as rhymes. A clever poem by Thomas Hood is used to illustrate the idea beginning with the snappy: If I were used to writing verse / And had a muse not so perverse…, which manages to sound almost like a proper rhyme, but isn't. This was a reminder of how technically excellent Hood is. He's the kind of writer who you meet solely through anthologies and invariably find yourself thinking very highly of. I remember doing Bridge of Sighs (I think that's the right title, it appears in Palgrave) when in the sixth form and loving the rhythms and feminine rhymes - tenderly/slenderly. I really must look for a collected edition one of these days.

All's Fair

It's odd how disturbing we can find even the most minor case of injustice, especially, frankly, pretty much exclusively, when we are on the receiving end thereof. Against all evidence to the contrary we somehow expect the universe to align itself to our cause. Life is unfair - a simple and obvious enough truth. Possibly it's especially hard to accept for those of us who're accustomed to life being more than fair in its rewards and blessings.

Of course, none of this is an excuse for not trying to make life fair - but I suspect this is only of any real worth when you are trying to make it fair for others. Something worth failing in.

(By the way, this is not a highfalutin way of suggesting that United should have two penalties last night against Barca. But they should have, anyway.)

Recovering

Over the last two days I've been paying for my six laps on Monday. My previously injured thigh seems to have come through the experience in reasonably healthy condition but whatever muscles lurk at the tops of my legs, sort of between the legs in that unpleasantly intimate way certain bits of one's body have about them, have been declaring their presence since Tuesday morning.

If childhood might be partly characterised as a process of exploration and discovery regarding the potential of the body and mind, late middle age sees the whole thing in reverse - a time for realising that things really do fall apart. And things are not going to get any better soon.

This all sounds terribly glum, I know, but there's something rather comforting in the inevitable decrepitude implied. It speaks of rest, containment, an odd sort of peace.

Under Review

My main, in fact, solitary purchase from Parkway Parade last Sunday was the April edition of The New York Review of Books. It was with some delight that I discovered that the newly opened branch of Borders there stocked the magazine late last year and I've been buying it ever since. The last time I bought a literary periodical regularly was when I lived in England some twenty years ago and such publications were fairly easy to come by. (Back then it was The Times Literary Supplement. Oh, and I also used to buy the music review Gramophone in an attempt to extend the capacity of my ears.)

The odd thing is though that now my delight on being able to get hold of this excellent review is tempered by a mounting sense of guilt (it's pretty expensive) that I don't always read it all - lack of time - and an equally mounting sense of worry that I'll start to rely on it as a primary source of reading rather than actual books. I suspect this is what a number of the literati are prone to. I'm also concerned that this can easily become allied to an easy, lazy acceptance of ready-made opinions about books and writers in place of a genuine struggle to form one's own.

I noticed this when reading an interesting piece on John Steinbeck. It's easy to be grandly dismissive of a writer like Steinbeck whose faults are obvious and the article though informative tended to go in this direction. I had to struggle to remember the hair-raising power of The Grapes of Wrath - that extraordinary ending! - to keep myself in touch with the reality of the first-hand reading experience.

It's worth remembering when reading this kind of periodical that the worst insult the two tramps in Waiting for Godot can think of to throw at each other is 'Critic!'

Erratum

Big mistake in my post for 12 April. It turns out that Mum is actually ninety this year. I think it's a reasonably forgivable error as she normally resolutely refuses to talk about her age and I was trying to figure it out from documents viewed quite some years ago. But yesterday, for the first time in living memory, she spoke directly of her age when I phoned her. I'm not exactly sure what precipitated this and she left me under strict orders not to tell everyone and of course I won't, well not outside this Far Place. Noi, in the meantime, is telling everyone.

In the meantime, spurred on by the possibility of making it to at least one more decade, I went for a run in the early evening, completing six (slow) laps of the track at school. I've hardly done any real exercise since Chinese New Year due to a highly disabling muscle strain in whatever muscle lurks in my right thigh, but the problem finally seems to have cleared and it's back to trying to take years off my biological age for me. (That's a line from So You Want To Live Longer, a programme the missus and I will be enjoying tonight, in my case even more self-righteously than usual.)