Friday 18 November 2011

Swimming in a sea of ignorance

The Cat's Mother has taken flight.

Well when I say taken flight she's off to Bath for the weekend with the 'girls'. That will mean a lot of screeching, screaming and shouting. All very Essex.

In theory that means I'm left in charge of the teenagers. As you can imagine that's not a great option. They're lovely. Really they're lovely. Sometimes. But truth be told I could do with 24 hours of peace and quiet. Where better then than a quick trip to Brighton, abandoning the offspring to burn the house down. You can't blame me really can you? I'll be on the seafront on Sunday practising and then having a roller-blading lesson for a couple of hours. I'm determined that if I'm going to an audition I'm going to give it my all. I haven't yet explained to the instructor why I 'urgently' need some lessons. I'm not sure I should. She might laugh at me.

It doesn't matter how old I get I still seem to find out things that frankly I should have known years and years ago. I find this quite exciting really. Some of these things; in fact all of them are quite simple stuff. When I started work at Rover some very many years ago, I, a car enthusiast discovered that some small cars have three doors and some have five. I had always assumed they all had just three. Just this week we were playing 'You Tube safari'...you start with a video of an artist/song you like and when it's finished click on the 'Similar videos' link to see where it takes you. It's great fun. Especially after a glass or two of fine red wine. As they say on the ads 'Fun for all the family'. Sometime into our safari we came across the video for Elton John's Tiny Dancer. It's a song we love. I've loved it for at least two or three years, and have thought it evidence that he's still able to bang out a good tune. So you can imagine my consternation when I read there on the screen that it's a track from Madman Across the Water, recorded in 1971. How could I have missed it for 40 years? I shall never know.



On the opther hand I was genuinely alarmed by a report on the Beeb today that some people think that anti-biotics will cure the common cold. They won't. Nor will the left overs from an unfinished course help you the next time you're ill. Evidently people 'self-medicate' and wonder why it all goes shit-shaped. There's a lad known to The Boy who's had a foot ailment for sometime....we may be talking years now. He's given drugs by the doctor but never finishes them, so it keeps flaring up. You'd have thought the very wealthy and successful parents would be able to manage to read a simple label on a bottle of pills and follow the instructions.