The walls are fine, everything in White Tie except for the chimney breast which is Brinjal. I wonder how much they pay the people who come up with names for Farrow & Ball of whom I often heard it said great colours, poor paint. I moved things aside slowly and replaced them in a slightly different order, equally slowly, dusting and washing all the way. I do my spring cleaning when I can and anyway, I’m not even sure we had a spring.
You may have noticed – we had a election ? Tick.
You may have noticed – lots of football and tennis ? Tick.
You may have noticed a music festival at Glastonbury ? Tick.
I shall not be saying anything about the above beyond the thought that if you call on Boris Johnson for anything other than a cheeseburger,
you are desperate.
A tile came loose on the front step. Within 24 hours, there were three, woggling like wonky teeth. I called Pimlico Plumbers who have succeeded and multiplied, effective if expensive. However in my limited experience of them , they keep time, know what they are doing and do it. They diversified into carpentry and all sorts of other lucrative byways and now have a section for Small Jobs. And getting small jobs done is getting very difficult. Small jobs ignored become too easily bigger ones – so I booked
and along came a man who did the job in half an hour.
The upstairs tenant whom I had informed mentioned the letting agency (whitter whitter, inside the property different from out, finger in mouth) or the landlady ? Hell freezes over faster. By the time we might expect a decision, the step would be no more. Don’t always have the money but this time, put it where the mouth is.
Laughed aloud at the beginning of yesterday’s piece by the fashion director of The Times about Lady Starmer’s early wardrobe appearances – “Now the election is over let’s talk about what really matters: Lady Starmer’s wardrobe.”
One of the saddest things about modern life is that when you really want to write and say how much you enjoyed something, you can’t:
you can complain, take out a subscription, complain about a subscription, sign up to online whatever it is, follow whoever on social media but the number of people to whom you can write in appreciation is now minimal.
I understand. Of course I understand. The world is full of people and quite a lot of them are horrible (ask Holly Willoughby – and she’s not alone). If people are gutless, unpleasant and violent, modern media serves them well. They can make mischief and can’t be held accountable. Troll city.
But the casualty is the positive – wanting to write appreciatively, a couple of lines for example to a woman who wrote wonderfully about the culture of the whinge, dog with sore paw syndrome, prizing (as she wrote) suffering over resilience. I channelled some of the latter so that when I gave up in the face of the obfuscation of her employing journal, I looked online. Write to her care of her representation ? I tried. Well, I suppose if terrestrial television programming is as bad as it is, you might care to spend half an hour on this. Or having your teeth drawn… I wished her well and went to do the shopping.
Faith (see annalog/modern life) and her partner have had a terrible health scare through which they are working and I saw her yesterday for the first time since Mags (partner) collapsed. The news is good, hooray, swift catch up between bananas and salad “and “ she said sweetly, almost blushing” we’re getting married next year.” She was so happy, you could reach out and touch it.
I’ve found a new writer a black high school dropout from Richmond, Virginia – his description – who ties big themes to mayhem and violence with no cliches I have noticed.
And few write about the rural poor black in the US, especially one of their own. Plus the sheer stickability of 40 books and short pieces. The song in the title is composed by Harold Arlen, words by Johnny Mercer – read in brackets, get on with it.
Annalog 