Bryter Layter?

It is interesting how the ‘undermind’ works. I must have death thoughts in my mind (with the recent death of Aunty Mary) because I found myself reaching for my old Nick Drake albums. For readers who don’t know Nick Drake he died in his late 20’s in the mid-1970’s. In his lifetime he sold only a few thousand copies of his 3 albums. Since his death, and mostly in the 1990’s he has sold over a million. I was a bit of a Drake pioneer, listening to his 3 albums in the 1980’s but have not done so recently. Today they sounded great. I don’t think my new anxiety book would have helped him. Apparently towards the end of his short life he was so far ‘gone’ (through depression) that he couldn’t even recognize close friends. An unimaginably dark place to be.

A routine work day. I finished off a workbook on diversity for a seminar I am piloting next week. And did the slides on open source software called Open Office Impress. I can convert these into PowerPoint. The beauty is that I downloaded this for free thereby by-passing the need to contribute further to Microsoft’s balance sheet. Soon, with the increasing amount of open source operating systems and software available for free we will all be able to do this. So few people know about it and seem happy to pay hundreds of £’s, $’s or €’s for MS Office.

Today I went out for much needed exercise. On the bike for an hour with my naughty youngest strapped to the back. I took my young ones to the park so they could cycle too and then it was back to base for egg on toast. And rice pudding. As I said yesterday, when away from the UK we revert to food we would never eat in England. The evening finished with a dose of the tele-tubbies. I must confess I begin to feel like La-La after an hour of watching them. I am trying to see where the educational content is until I then ask myself why there needs to be. I have many pleasures with no educational content at all so why should I deprive my youngest of simple purposeless pleasure. There is a great book by a guy who claims to have learnt everything he knows from TV. I think we have become a little puritanical about TV. My eldest daughter knows much more about the world than I knew at her age, largely through TV. She even watched and seemed to enjoy ‘The Sky at Night’ recently. She watched an image of the sun blowing up (anticipated in around 4 billion years) and I had to explain what a large number 4 billion is.

Tomorrow night Caroline returns and I will be back in the UK on Saturday until January 3. I have my London house on the market. My wonderful estate agent (who will be named here soon if they don’t start working a bit harder) has managed to solicit only 4 viewing in 4 weeks.

Music of the day: Bryter Layter, Pink Moon, Five Leaves Left – the 3 Nick Drake albums.