It's December which means that I have to turn my mind to what to buy for the inestimable P. I am in the grip of a stupendous failure of imagination. Help me O Blogosphere! What should I buy for the woman who has given me everything?
Don't worry about charity gifts - that's been taken care of - concentrate instead on raw material greed.
A few months ago, Penny entered the ballot for the London Marathon 2008. I entered too because when you are turned down (as you inevitably are) they get to keep your entry fee and give it to charity. They usually also send through a rather natty fleece as a thank you.
Now Moobs, the bookies' bestest friend; he who never wins a raffle, has a place in next years race. I say next year but in fact I only have 20 weeks to rearrange my bodyweight into something a little more aerodynamic. Penny, she who watches what she eats; she who exercises regularly, didn't get a place.
God has a very sick sense of humour.
We are currently in Okinawa. Our hotel TV offers, for our entertainment, the American Armed Forces Netwrok. Along with a number of bizarre morale boosting messages (where the ads should be) they have been showing the 2007 Country Music Awards - presumably on the basis that listening to country music makes you more likely to want to kill people.
REPOSTED from Moobz.com
You read blogs so I know that, like me, you know moving the written word can be. Often, the skill of the writer transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Today I have been reading words that, without artifice of any kind, wrung my heart.
I sat in an archive in Hiroshima and read the translated accounts of the day of the bombing. One witness wrote of how he had been caught in the blast with a group of school friends. They were trapped beneath a collapsed building. Injured himself, he dug two friends free. But others called to him from beneath the rubble, begging to be rescued. Fire was spreading quickly and, unable to save those crying his name, he ran and ran until he was in the suburbs. He ran past people whose clothes had beeen burned away and whose skin hung from their fingernails. They called to him, desperately asking him to take them with him. He ran without stopping.
When he has finished telling his story, he turns himself to entreaty; begging those he left behind to forgive him. There on the page, in a few words, is expressed an unimaginable pain - an unearned shame that he has never been able to come to terms with - desperate for a forgiveness that can never be granted.
Hiroshima is full of folded paper cranes. Here is the story behind them: A girl who was 2 when the bomb was exploded, developed Leukaemia at 10. She was told that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would have a wish come true. She died before she could complete the task. Her school friends then campaigned successfully to have a memorial erected to the child victims of the bomb. Schoolchildren send cranes that they have folded to be left at the memorial.
This picture is of paper cranes left at the feet of the angel that is at the centre of the Children's Memorial.
These cranes are at the mound where the ashes of 70,000 casualties are interred.
This last picture is of the hypocentre. The bomb exploded 600 m above this spot. I expected to see the sky broken in some way.
What movie did you expect would be terrible, but was actually really good?
Danny Boyle's "Millions"
Whilst I am commenting on journalists who seem to have difficulty spotting oppressive behaviour, the Times yesterday informed its readres than several Burmese were killed when the authorities "fired warning shots at the crowd".
At the crowd? What were they warning the people they shot about exactly?
Let's hope this push for democracy works and a few more dictators and demagogues get a warning of their own.
Some things, are, I suppose, a metter of perspective. I have just finished reading an article in the super soaraway "International Bar News". The article is concerned with Sharia Law. the author is anxious to make the point that the reputation that Sharia law has acquired for draconian penalties is, if not misplaced, then something of a stereotype:
"According to Farooq, 'Sharia has become synonymous mot with Islamic values and principles but almost exclusively with harsh penal laws'. However, an examination of the many forms of Sharia, including its penal laws, is appropriate. Sharia differs widely in how it is implemented throughout the Islamic world, with some countries practising harsher or more liberal forms. Saudi Arabia, for example, which claims to live under pure Sharia law, has long practised a severe form of this law by enforcing the penalties for Hadd offences. Hadd offences carry specific penalties such as flogging or stoning to death for sexual offences, and the amputation of a hand for theft. In many Islamic countries, however, adultery and the drinking of alcohol are defined as criminal rather than Hadd offences in law and are therefore punishable by a prison term instead" [My emphasis]
Only getting prison for adultery?! Those bloody liberals had better watch out or they'll be getting a reputation for being softies.
So I sit down to draft an account of the party in my office and I find I can hear snoring. Very loud snoring. There is no-one under the desk. There is no-one in the lounge. I realise it must be coming through the ceiling. But that would make no sense of any kind. Immediately above my office is the bathroom. We trudge up the stairs and put an ear to the bathroom door. There is our missing guest ... asleep on the loo.
Owe, Disgruntled, Foxy, Pogster, Ms P, and Kate were, frankly, skill. ANd that is leaving the dancing out of account.
I really really love books. From my point of view, the house will not be finished until the last of the shelving is built in. When I was a boy I was a desperate and dweeby member of the Puffin Club and read as much as my pocket money allowed. From then on I have accumulated box after box of books. I have ranks of (Iain) Banks; mazy backstreets full of Dickens and Corinthian columns of Penguin Classics. For most of the last 4 years my little darlings have been in boxes in the garage. Now P menaces them like Herod with a hangover. For her the answer the Malthuisian difficulty I have with the sheer number of books I possess is obvious: throw them out. But how can anyone, I ask you, throw a book away, even a raddled Penguin Modern Classic with yellowed leaves?
The answer used to be to give them to charity. However, when P turned up today with two boxfuls of the stuff I could bear to be parted from (in truth, they were mostly her holiday novels) Oxfam closed and bolted the door. I gather that most of the books dumped on them end up recycled in any event.
It is time to be strong. I will have to cull. Some of them I will hit with a spade and bury in a riverbank; others will have to be dropped mewling into the water in a sack. I know it must be done. But some were good attentive books that washed behind their ears and paid attention at school and somehow summarily executing them seems a brutal act. I would like to give these bright souls a chance to escape. Give them, as it were, a headstart, before my gap-toothed, hilly-billy pyschopaths and I start chasing them through the underbrush with a shotgun and a bottle of moonshine.
Would anyone, for instance, consider giving a home to the 12 volumes of Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time"? I will happily wrap them and send them through the post to you at my expense. This is a no obligation offer and, if things don't work out between you, you can always have them sew footballs for a dollar a day.
