Porridge and poetry

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware that it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that it is better for your mental health if somebody it eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning I ate my oatmeal with John Keats.

Extract from Oatmeal by Galway Kinnell.

St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol

 

Flying off the shelves.

Still confused why no newspapers have picked up this remarkable story: Norman Lebrecht's obituary for the classical recording industry has had its own secret life since its publication, culminating in a shameful death in court last week. Naxos founder Klaus Heymann took the provocative critic to court over defamatory remarks made in the book. Funnily enough, the drastic steps that the book's publishers have to take - namely withdrawing the book from the shelves, apologising and paying damages - haven't been reported on Lebrecht's website or blog. Take a look here for more...

Clifton Suspension Bridge

 

Allo?

I'm still pondering the phone-answering etiquette for BBC's Who Do You Think You Are programme and magazine. Envisage the scene. Interested reader decides to call up office: 'Ring, ring.' Worker in office picks up: 'Hello, who do you think you are?'

Heard the news?

In the early 1700s, according to Andrew Marr's addictive account of British journalism, newspapers were pretty weird and wonderful, and often to be found skulking in that nebulous area between private and public news. 'Some, for instance, like Ichabod Dawk's News-Letter made a point of leaving some space blank for personal news, which could then be written in and posted on to friends and relatives in the country.' Imagine if one of the free London Tube papers clamouring for commuters' attention carried a blank page for personal news. A new incentive to read one of the discarded papers lining every Tube carriage? Free news, celebrity gossip oh, and if you want to know why the person sitting opposite is not talking to his next-door neighbour, turn to page 15. Or who third-from-the-left is going out with? Heard the latest about Ichabod Dawk's money-making scam? But then I suppose finding out in public someone's personal news is what loud mobile phone conversations on the train are all about.

Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality.

In London there's a bit of a divide between people who take the bus and those who take the Tube. Tube fans love to hate the quirks of individual tube lines - the distinctly leisurely attitude of the District Line, the headlong rush of Piccadilly trains, the workman like thrum of the Central line or the downright infuriating ever-decreasing circles of the Circle Line. Complaining about free papers thrust at you from all directions, whilst secretly relishing being drip-fed celebrity gossip, is high on the list of tube activities, especially now that the craze for trying to solve your next-door neighbour's Sudoku as you peer over their shoulder has passed. In Bristol the divide is simpler. Those who are on the bus, and those who are still waiting at the bus stop. Yes, that's right. Bristol buses are not the best in the world, and at £2.10 per single and with a free Metro paper, it's easy to kid yourself that you're in London. After just two weeks of Bristol buses I've clocked up several hours of bus-stop waiting in rain, wind and shine due to buses not turning up, sailing right past expectant passengers, and just being plain late. Though bus activities are rather more sociable. People actually talk to each other on the bus, and even offer a helping hand or piece of advice. And one day, for no reason in particular, the bus home was free. Rant over.

Moving house.

'I'm sorry for the long silence, but you can imagine what desperate packings occupied our lives, what desperate unpackings again to retrieve things prematurely packed, what form-fillings and cupboard emptyings, what rendings of the heart, what rentings of the house, what injections and dejections, what forwardings and backwardings, what helpful briefings, what unhelpful longings, what second thoughts and first impressions.'

Michael Frayn
The Trick of It

Perhaps searching over the past two weeks for somewhere to live wasn't quite as dramatic or traumatic as the experience Michael Frayn puts his characters through, but this short paragraph, or rather long sentence, contains the juxtaposition of practical headaches with emotional heartaches that moving house entails.

Service resumes!

Unintentionally, for the past 18 days I appear to have been on a postal strike. The blogging kind of post, that is. Normal blogging postal service will now resume. Let's hope that the Royal Mail strike doesn't last as long as the Becca's Blog strike.