I am so pathetic you can only laugh. It makes me laugh. After I wrote yesterday's entry I laughed out loud to myself. At myself. I am pathetic.
But how lovely to make a living making mischief. Not that I get paid for mucking around on wikipedia.
But by the end of the day, some sensible/humourless (delete as applicable - or just leave them both there) had removed both my comment about Kevin and one I added on my own site along the lines of, "Richard also has a keen interest in adding and subtracting stuff on his own wikipedia entry as well as spreading lies on others." Which is at least true. Ah well. We must take wikipedia seriously. It is a marvelous resource. And not to be toyed with. I hope we've all learned our lesson.
In between avoiding doing any work I am reading
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh. I have never read him before. I think subconsciously I had a grudge against him as back in the early 80s my mum used to insist on watching
"Brideshead Revisited" when I wanted to watch
AlFresco. This was back in the days when people only had one TV and obviously before we had a video recorder. My mum wanted to watch a programme about Oxford toffs who played with teddy bears (as is my understanding of the book I have not read and the TV show I didn't watch) on ITV, whilst I wanted to watch my comedy heroes in their new sketch show on Channel 4. Though now I look at it Brideshead Revisited was on in 1981 and Alfresco was on in 1983 and 1984. So either my memory has spectacularly failed me again, or my mum wanted to watch a repeat of Brideshead Revisited, which is much more annoying as she could have just watched it in 1981 and allowed me to see the disappointing sketch show that I so coveted.
Did we really not have a video recorder in 1983? We must have done. I have an absolute clear memory of the arguments we had about this, but is is possible that it wasn't over Alfresco at all? I definitely managed to see some of the episodes as I recall being very amused by Ben Elton's tale of "Ironic Monty" - "and on his grave it reads, "Ironic Monty isn't buried here."" (does it go on - and the ironic thing is that he isn't or that he is? Or have I made up the whole routine as well?)
Anyway subconsciously I must have blamed the author of Brideshead Revisited for denying me this show (even if he didn't) by writing his stupid gay book. Even though apparently Alfresco is a bit rubbish. I could never have known back then that one day I would be able to purchase both "Brideshead Revisited" and "Alfresco" on video or DVD (I actually bought my mum the former on video for Christmas a few years ago, as a sarcastic gesture that I am sure she didn't understand - especially if the impetus for my anger was entirely imagined).
But I am glad I did not make it a lifelong boycott of Waugh, because I am really enjoying "Decline and Fall" and I might even read "Brideshead Revisited" next. Who would have thought it. And if I ever have a teenage son and he wants to watch something on TV, I am going to put Brideshead Revisited on all our sets and screens and computers and iPods or whatever they have in that future time and make him watch only that.
Luckily for him I will be so old by then that I will be unable to carry out this threat. Unluckily for him I am already so old that chances are that he will never exist. And if he does then I might not exist by that stage of affairs. Still at least he'll have this blog to look back at and wonder how his dad was such an enormous dick. Hey son! How's the future? Sorry about global warming and all that. We really could have done more, but we couldn't be bothered.
My only quibble with the edition of "Decline and Fall" I have got is that their are an awful lot of explanatory footnotes added by the editor, many of which explain things that I already know. I think he's put too many in. Why can't he have just put footnotes in for the things that I didn't know about and not the things I know about already?
I also though, get annoyed when I read a book where loads of foreign terms and phrases are used without explanation, as if the author expects everyone who reads their book to be as erudite as them.
I just want to read books where the level of knowledge that is assumed by the editor is the exact level of knowledge I have. And anything that doesn't fall exactly within those perimeters is incredibly annoying for me.
Am I asking too much?
But hopefully in the future they will be able to make computer books that totally fulfil my unreasonable demands.
And you can say what you like about Evelyn Waugh. At least he wrote his books. Which is more than can be said for me at the moment. Slowly going mental in a cottage in Oxfordshire on my own.
Collings isn't coming. He's claiming he had a TV thing,
but that he got bumped by George W Bush
My point is that ever since I mentioned the mattress in the wood he's gone all strange on me. Ah well.
I have a feeling I shall make some progress tomorrow. It's actually going better than it would have been if I'd been at home. And at the very least it means my diet is going really well. It's so hard to get any extra food! If I can lose 4 pounds while I'm here I don't really care about the book.
