Big Fat Pig In Anniversary Crash

It's wedding anniversary number thirty-six for BFP and the Groupie, the day when everyone asks why the hell does she put up with him.

The Pig (whose keep/get fit programme is still going strong) decided to mark the day with a long cycle ride - in Pig language that means two and a half hours on the road. Today he took on four climbs in his route and was feeling quite pleased as he coasted back to Casa Piggy with the clock ticking down to the allotted time. He arrived at the head of the road with thirty seconds left and therefore decided (stupid completist that he is) to throw in a tiny detour and u-turn to ensure the time was all used. It was the u-turn that brought about the crash, the Pig foolishly thinking he could match the turning circle of a London cab. He can't. End result: kerb clipped, slow motion crash and Pig lying on the pavement with the Precious Bike on top of him. Damage seems to be limited to the cosmetic (both Pig and more importantly Precious Bike) though the scars on knee and elbow look quite impressive. The Pig was helped to his feet by a nearby labourer who had witnessed the crash. He was kind enough not to offer the obvious advice that someone of the Pig's advanced years might want to be more careful.

And here's the thing. Some daft auto-pilot clicks in on such occasions - the Pig remembered to stop his watch as he lay on the pavement. Two hours, thirty minutes and forty seconds. Mission accomplished.  

An Amiable Bloodbath

Shaun of the Dead is a nice punning title and this dark comedy nods its head very affectionately at the zombie genre. Heads are severed and battered and, quite properly for this very English piece, our shambolic hero defends himself for much of the film with a cricket bat.

Among a certain generation this movie (for so they would term it) attracts rave reviews. That is a tad de trop but it is consistently funny and well played by a roll call of English acting excellence. 62/100.

Of Good Fellowship And An Unknown Friend

It didn't just rain last week, it bloody poured. It should have been the week of the QMT golf tour but coronavirus obviously put paid to that. In its place BH was at the helm of organising a three day festival of local golf - Wednesday Aston Wood, Thursday Lickey Hills, and Friday Pype Hayes. Most particularly on the first two days we got thoroughly soaked, indeed at Aston Wood the lightning forced us off the course early. Despite the vagaries of the English summer a good time was had by all. Thanks Brian.

Lickey Hills (pictured) was a revelation to me - like Pype Hayes a public course free from any airs and graces and very pretty to look at. I thought it a good test of my geriatric game and despite the constant downpour I played one of my best rounds in an eternity. We shall return. Thanks to JRS and MS for keeping me company - walking off after nine in those conditions would have been perfectly understandable but I was playing quite passably so they kept me company.

And as for my unknown friend, well that is whoever found and handed in my wedge at Pype Hayes - I only noticed its loss this morning but it was safely stowed in the stockroom at Pype Hayes. Faith in human nature duly refreshed.

Brave New World

I'm afraid my title is ironic, as it was for Huxley and, in the original, also for Shakespeare.

Lawrence of Arabia is being shown on Sky Movies this afternoon. A geat film I hope you might agree. The good people at Sky in their summary of the movie can manage only the following craven and mealy-mouthed words:

This film has outdated attitudes, language and cultural depictions which may cause offence today.

WTF as the kids say.

A Not Unsatisfactory Day

Did you like the double negative? It's something David Gower favours in his cricket commentaries and although it can seem a trifle affected I think it's not unacceptable to mimic one's heroes.

The day to which I refer is the immediate past Saturday. I was on the first tee at Pype Hayes at 7.14 to play with BH and my little brother WJR. The weather forecast for the day had been pretty dire but along the lines of the sun shining on the righteous (I accept on reflection that any reference to BH, WJR and the Pig as righteous might be stretching it) it proved perfect golfing weather - not too hot and a gentle breeze to keep it interesting. As it happened I played a tad worse than earlier in the week but not so badly as to prompt despondency. The company was matchless and we got round in a little over three hours without ever having to wait over a shot and without causing anyone behind us to wait - would that it were always so.

After a socially distanced chat with the lads I was back home by half eleven and after a brief interval and a cup of not unimpressive coffee (Kenyan) I was out mowing the lawn with the not unprecious mower. Now here I have to confess an error - I don't know what flitted across my consciousness but I lost my sense of direction and cut an errant stripe. It doesn't look too bad but I, of course, can see it. Oh well it is nice to have goals, so next time I will get it right. The search for lawn perfection keeps me young.

Golf done, lawn mowed, I was soon able to treat myself to a not inelegant glass of 2016 Primitivo. Wine really does taste better if you make yourself wait until the weekend. If, dear reader, you have shares in Majestic Wine you might want to sell them now that the Pig is spending rather less there than had become habitual.

A day such as Saturday deserves to be rounded off by a good film. Well, Pig and the Groupie did not in all truth watch a good film but we did watch the not unentertaining Angel has Fallen. If you have seen either of the previous two entries from this stable, Olympus has Fallen, and London has Fallen, you will not be surprised to learn that the baddies make an attempt on the President's life and it falls to Gerard Butler single-handedly to bring them to account. Silly, violent, profane but not borne down by a sense of its own importance, I like films like this when I'm in the mood. Saturday was such a day. Oh and it has a slight but amusing final scene. 52/100.

So all in all and as I say, not unsatisfactory. 

Welcome To Hardy Country

It's an indicative confession that this man with a respectable first class degree in English has never before in his sixty years read any Thomas Hardy. This man, the Overgraduate aka Big Fat Pig (though getting slimmer - more of this below) has always struggled with the Victorian novel - loved David Copperfield but couldn't hack the rest of Dickens, fought through Middlemarch through a sense of obligation, etc.

Well anyway shame at this omission has caught up with me and I have pulled from the shelf a three novel collection of Hardy texts which I seem to have acquired for the princely sum of one of your English pounds. The nagging guilt must have acted upon me when I bought it, although I cannot for the life of me remember when that might have been. And now I've started on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, so I intend to finish. It's heavy going particularly as I came to this after the quick pleasure of re-reading Simon Raven's Fielding Gray. However I can see why Hardy has admirers and before we got to Tess's fall (I strongly suspect this will not be the lowest point of her trajectory) I was taken with one of the best descriptions of joyful drunkenness that I have encountered:

The fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait ... Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thought, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Now you have to admit that's rather beautiful.

So I mentioned, did I not, that the Pig is shrinking. He is playing a bit of golf (not too badly as it happens - not well but you know what I mean) and that is a help but more importantly the Pig is regularly gracing the mean streets of Four Oaks in his athletic gear. He is up to ninety minute runs and one hundred and fifty minute cycle rides. There is power to add. Hopefully.

 

Black Lives Matter

Of course they do - as do all hues of human life. However the current outcry in the United States (mimicked elsewhere for a variety of good and bad reasons) is rightly about the unseemly death of George Floyd. The facts seem to be these: Floyd, a large black man was reported to police for trying to pay for groceries with a counterfeit banknote; he carried no weapon; upon his arrest he was bound but resisted efforts to put him in the squad car, avowing claustrophobia; the police in attendance then restrained him in the prone position, one officer placing his knee on Floyd's neck; the force applied by the detaining officer was such that Floyd died; passers-by filmed the imbroglio; after an inexplicable delay the restraining officer has been charged with third degree murder, a charge which alleges what we might loosely define as killing by criminal callousness, falling short of an outright intent to kill. Protests have ensued and these have degenerated into rioting and looting.

The rioting is wrong and affords an easy way out for those apologists for the senseless police actions.

But I will, in case it has eluded you (I doubt it has), nothing, I repeat nothing, can mitigate the sheer brazen immorality of the photo-opportunity schemed by the Commander in Chief of the United States. I reproduce the resulting image below. Be afraid America, be afraid the rest of us. Evil stalks the earth.

This Is The Castle

Dad had an innocent affection for scouring secondhand book shops for unremarkable first editions. He would never have paid the going rate for important such editions. He also liked to pass some of those editions on to me as gifts. I have just finished reading one of them and I'm sorry I didn't get round to it sooner - not because of any great literary merit but because of the note in Dad's familiar handwriting which I found in it when I picked it up off my bookshelf. The note was neatly folded in two and on its outer leaf was the text, 'D, Read the book first and then read this note! Dad X'.

Well, I have at last done as directed and today I finished this curiosity of a novel. I have opened the note and Dad's reading of the bizarre ending is not quite the same as mine. I won't set it our here in case you want to try the book for yourself. It is the work of a successful but not critically acclaimed author and it is about a successful but not critically acclaimed author, so there is an element of navel-gazing going on - This is the Castle by Nicolas Freeling. Not by any stretch a great novel but a commendably workmanlike one and it contains an important gem of a passge about the author as manic depressive that hits the nail on the head:

Fear of having talent and fear of not having any - manic depressive, isn't it? - depends whether the swing of the moment is up or down.

I miss the sorts of conversation about books that Dad and I shared. Of course dementia had ended those conversations by the end but there are decades of golden memories. That note has been carefully re-folded and put back in the book - perhaps someday another reader will find it and enjoy the game of reading. I hope so.