I Gotta Feeling

I like music.  No!  I love music.  While my wife was sitting downstairs enjoying The Sound of Music on tv, I decided to dip into the wealth of pop available on You Tube and watch I Gotta Feeling (by the Black Eyed Peas).  Imagine my surprise when the music video was preceded by an ad (surely a spoof?) for SingleMuslim.com.  What next?  KosherDates.com or MatesforMethodists.co.uk?  Actually that one sounds like a condom ad for nonconformists.   But why should I be surprised?  My reaction is interesting and presupposes a negative judgement, but why?  I'm not entirely sure, however I am curious.  (The picture of Pink appears as a not quite random choice and will hopefully be discussed in a later post.)

A tidy house is a wasted life

I have tried and failed on numerous occasions to persuade my wife that we need an au pair, someone to ease the daily burden of keeping a largish house clean and free of dust, unwashed clothing, cat hair, dirty dishes, discarded newspapers, and so on.  She has not so far been persuaded.  Nonetheless my scheme has a great deal to commend it.  An  employment opportunity for a young woman, still the gender more discriminated against in the job market.  An employment opportunity for a migrant worker, for we hold no truck with racial discrimination.  And think of the fringe benefits, not least of which is the freeing up of all that time to engage in more fruitful and leisurely pursuits - painting, cycling, hillwalking, reading.  For is there not truth in the old saw that 'a tidy house is a wasted life'?  As Richard Dawkins, author of the seminal work 'The Selfish Gene' would undoubtedly recognise, my suggestion for a (female) au pair is entirely altruistic.  But still my wife proves stubbornly resistant to the idea and I can't think why.

Cover point

Once again I have missed a tremendously exciting Test Series because of my refusal to hand money over to the Rupert Murdoch Corporation.  But who is the greater loser? Rupert won't miss my measly contribution to his overflowing coffers but I have missed out on watching some great cricket - and England won.  I console myself with the thought that a Sky subscription would amount to several hundred pounds a year, surely better spent on a holiday.  And having Sky would inevitably lead to more hours slumped in front of the tv.  (Question to self: why is this such a bad thing given that I happily slump for hours on the sofa listening to music or the radio?)  Anyway, one of my resolutions for 2011 is to learn by heart the fielding positions in cricket, all of them.  This ties in neatly (to my mind anyway) with my determination to learn the Chronology of the Ancient World, starting with Ancient Greece, which I have already begun to do.  Progress is slow however. 

A plague on both their houses

The government proposes that cash machines routinely give customers the opportunity to donate to charity, or not.  The government proposes that 'giving' should be made a new social norm without saying how exactly they would achieve this.  The government proposes a number of different things to make into a reality the fuzzy, farcical notion of Cameorn's 'Big Society', but stressing that this should be done by persuasion not coercion.  It is certainly striking that 8% of the population contributes more than 50% of the charitable donations.  However, a friend of mine would always argue that charitable donation undermines the social and moral responsibilities of government.  Giving money to good causes allows the government to reduce its own spending or eliminate it altogether.   And isn't this precisely what is happening?  Isn't the slew of ideas from the think-tank green paper simply a political tool to rationalise, post hoc, the decision to reduce public spending?  A decision that is totemic.  A decision taken more for reasons of political ideology than economic necessity, whatever the buggers in the Coalition Government say.  (Petition #1 for 2011.  No more with 'Coalition Govenrment'.  Let's call it 'A Plague on Both their Houses').

A vow

This is how the world outside my window should look today.  It doesn't.  The skies are grey and overcast.  It's damp.  The roads are smeared with slushy brown snow.  There are still piles of hard packed snow and ice standing sullenly on street corners sulkily refusing to melt. To cap it all I think I may be struggling to ward off a cold.  Rats!  I want to be walking through trees along a broad, sun dappled path.  At the end of the path would be a small restaurant where we would have a long leisurely lunch - with wine - before walking back again.  Next year.  Next Christmas.  I vow by all that is mighty in Santa Land that we will be trekking along such a path as this in the weakly warm winter sun of southern Spain - or Rhodes -  instead of trudging through December snow in Scotland.

Snacking with the big boys

So, first it was Pringles.  Then I graduated to 'handmade' crisps.  Now it's cheese straws. Seems like I'm snacking with the big boys. I first saw them being eaten by a colleague at work. I then bought some from the Co-Op one Sunday morning having popped out to get my Observer.  Then we taste-tested packets of different cheese-straws from Sainsbury, Tesco, Asda and Marks & Spencer.  My wife bought a truckload of the delightful things over Christmas and my will-power when confronted by an open packet fell to zero - if I'm drinking wine.  Or milk come to that.  They surely must be loaded with monosodium glutamate or some other food additive that makes them so addictive.  How else can you explain my greed? 

Thanks, Kafka!

It went.  My newly grown beard didn't even last a week.    And I couldn't decide if my wife was happy or not, but she was probably too polite to say.  Or perhaps she has seen it all before.  This would have been the umpteenth time I had started, without finishing, the cultivation of a beard.  The rest of the family didn't even notice.  Oh, well.  I'm not even sure that I feel any different.  So much for the bloody metamorphosis.  Thanks, Kafka!