Real Names That I've Heard Recently That I Like and Want to Remember

"Nish Kumar."  He's a comedian in England. I like that his name seems like it might be a nickname for "Danish" or "Finish" or something.

"Penny Cleverly."  Need I say more?  I wish this had been mine name.

"Luke Fortune."   How lucky can you get? I'll bet the good fairy came to his christening too.

Off the Turnip Truck

Sundown tonight in #centralpark #nyc #nofilter pic.twitter.com/oRsQUNryXI

— Kim Velk (@woolfoot) February 26, 2016

A Good Time to Be Pretty & She Was Kind to Cars

I got a call from high-school-senior daughter this morning.  Our 1994 Toyota Camry with 260,000 miles on it - the one that she drives because we are people who think it is enough that she has any car to drive at all-  was making bad noises.  She  managed to make an appointment with the local garage for after school to check out the noise.  The gents of the local garage are, as per me, a bit of a shifty bunch. I told her to have them call me before any repairs got authorized.

Fast forward to 3 PM.  The young mechanic to whom she handed her iPhone said "it's a spring and a strut."  I pitched him a softball: "Don't you have do both sides?" He said (are you sitting down?) "No."

I'm not sure that's right but did I mention 260,000 miles?  He told me it was going to be about $300.  I said, "fine."

My daughter then had a friend come fetch her at the garage. The two of them were returning here just as I was pulling into the garage in the State of Vermont fleet vehicle that I have this evening (more on that in a minute).

She and I began discussing the transportation dilemmas that will be caused by not having Ye Ancient Camry tomorrow.  This being Vermont, my kids' whole school skis on Friday (tomorrow).  No Camry means trouble to-ing and fro-ing for both my kids.  I have to leave at 6 AM tomorrow in the aforementioned fleet car to get to a court hearing two and half hours from home . Turns out, however, that we might not actually have a problem.

"The guy said he would come in at six tomorrow morning and get my car fixed in time for Friday program," my daughter said as we made our way up to our kitchen.  "It pays to get up and put on make up every day," she added.

Right.  Never having been pretty myself I never learned how it can pay.  (Not bragging or anything but that's her up there.  A colleague, seeing this picture on my desk once said, "no offense but she obviously hit the genetic jack pot."  Yes.  That's true).

But I'm not here to totally disparage myself.  Why? Let me tell you a heartwarming little story.

I had to leave my own car in the vast Siberian parking lot at the state office campus just now in order to pick up the fleet car.  I was resentful for a bit, thinking that my poor little car was going to have to suffer the winds and subzero temperatures in the parking lot tonight instead of in its home in our garage.  Then, however, I thought of how the fleet car doesn't properly belong to anyone, how no one loves it, how it is part of no one's family.  It never goes anywhere fun. The people in it are never making happy memories. When it's time for it to go it will be nothing but a cold calculation - how many miles, what repairs etc.  So. I'm like a foster mother tonight to the orphan car.  I thought, well, you enjoy that garage, you unloved utilitarian Ford you.  So, maybe a beautiful soul if nothing else.

Another Top Tip - Desert Island Discs

A couple of months ago I stumbled onto the venerable BBC Radio 4 Program, Desert Island Discs.  Since then I have been listening to the new shows each week and combing through the archive.  It is not too much to say that I can't get enough.  Fortunately, it is an almost inexhaustible listening resource.

I defy anyone to show me a more genius idea for an interview program.  The format is simple: interviewees are asked which eight discs (well, it started in 1942 so "discs" it remains) they would take if marooned on a desert island.  While they talk about their choices, they also talk about their lives.  There are famous people, celebrities, etc. but also, crucially, people who aren't famous except in their own fields.  To wit, a pioneering allergist, a prize-winning landscape designer, a supermarket magnate.

If you have a favorite actor, writer, singer, scientist check the archive and you may well find that he or she has been interviewed.  My favorite interviews so far have been the ones with Michael Caine, Roger Waters, Princess Margaret, and Robert Hardy.

One more tip, sometimes the programs aren't available to stream, but I have found I can download those as MP3 files and play them that way.

One of the things I like best about the show is that it doesn't appear to be tied in any way to the current marketing efforts of the guests.  That is, they aren't asked on because they have a new book/album/movie are are making the rounds of the chat shows. The focus is on entire careers and biography.  Brilliant.

The Truth Hurts

Oh Francis Bacon.  You know it.

Doth any man doubt that, if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things full of melancholy and indisposition, unpleasing to themselves?

In the City

A fine, wet night

I'm in Montreal tonight, on my own.  I came to town with the Infanta but she jettisoned me ASAP in favor of one of her friends here.  Really, I don't mind.  It takes me back, being here on my own as I was so often in college and law school days.

I bought a ticket to The Martian and watched it in one of Montreal's best movie theaters.  I liked the film a lot - for the story, the acting, the production values and also because it was born of a book originally self-published by Andy Weir.  Let us never forget the great lesson taught by Peter Gabriel: "all of the buildings, all of the cars, were once just a dream in somebody's head."

Andy Weir had an idea, realized it, next thing you know Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig are learning their lines and I'm leaning back in a comfy seat half way up.  It's almost as miraculous as the story of The Martian itself.

The film ended just before 10 PM and in the two and a half hours that I was in the theater the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees. The odd-for-November warm wind that buffeted the car on the way into town had changed. It was appropriately cold and the rain had turned to fat snow snow flakes.  I walked home to Whusband's apartment in the McGill Ghetto through the dark McGill campus. I had an umbrella as a shield from the wind and wet snow, which was helpful as I was wrongly dressed. I didn't mind that either, however.  It was just the right amount of wind and cold: bracing without being freezing.  I don't have to go anywhere tonight and as Adam Gopnik once told me, Montreal is most itself in the cold.  The picture above is one that I snapped of St. Catherine Street just after I exited the drugstore across the street from the theater: Montreal looking fine with rain slicked pavements and Christmas decor.

This isn't a real snowstorm, but it has me thinking of the ones I lived through here all those years ago. In student days I could get where ever I had to go on foot.  I didn't have to worry much about snow.  A hush would come over the city on those snowstorm nights - only taxis still out and about in the small hours. I loved to watch the snow pile up on those nights, falling fast passed the yellow streetlights...

I have been, unaccountably, in a bad mood for the last few days.  Thanksgiving was OK but I was irritated, mostly with myself but with others too. This night and this cold wind seem to have blown that feeling away.

Yoo Hoo! Still Upright, Breathing, and Occasionally Writing

Write to Win! (Or Not...)

I've been away.  You may not have noticed but I'll forgive you.  You're here now and that's what matters. How about a nice cup of tea and a sit down?

As Bob Dylan taught us all long ago, you gotta serve somebody and the somebodies I serve (for a salary and health insurance and all that) are now paying for more of my time. Not much is left for this kind of thing these days.

I'm back at the keyboard this Sunday afternoon - as you will have noticed- having gathered a little strength, thanks to my weekend schedule, the aforementioned tea, and sushi takeout for dinner.

The one bit of writing I've done for fun in the last month (well, for fun and dreamed-of glory) was in response to a contest by The Guardian. I admire the entrepreneurial spirit of the Guardian book people.  They have started  offering writing classes to the world's hopefuls.  To promote these courses they threw out a writing prompt.  It caught my eye and my imagination and so I entered.

With what result?

The usual one I'm afraid.  I have been staggeringly consistent in not winning contests. I was pretty good at musical chairs once but since then...

Anyway, having put forth the effort, I'm reproducing my entry here for your consideration.  The task was to write a story of between 500 and 750 words beginning with the sentence:

He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne. 

Here's my entry.  Below that is a link to the winning entries.  Thanks for stopping in.  I'll be back, one day soon I hope.

“He spent his last £30 on a plate of oysters and a glass of champagne.” Inspector Digget looked up from his battered notebook and met the eyes of his reluctant hostess. “Or so we believe.”

 “And why is that Inspector?” Ms. Fields-Hall said.

 “Well, the waiter - the one who called 999 last night - reported that the bill for…” Digget held the notebook at arms-length and read, “ ‘one glass of Duval-Leroy Brut and one small plate of mixed oysters with spicy boar sausage’ came to £31, before VAT.”

“So, with the VAT it would have been, what, £37.20?”

Digget was impressed by the speed of the calculation. “Right. However, when the bill was presented, your brother had only,” he read again, “‘A twenty pound note, a five pound note, four pound coins and some change.’  He told the waiter it was all he had.’”

 “So he ordered his last meal knowing he couldn’t pay for it. No one could say he wasn’t consistent.”

 Digget was pleased that Constable Jonas, who had been sent along to shadow him on this delicate interview, remained silent. Digget was to do the talking.

 “The waiter was going to call the manager,” he continued, “but your brother said: “‘it was these trainers, Mate. Do you know how much these things cost? Seventy Eight pounds.’” Digget read this with no intonation. He thought he sounded like Michael Caine, which embarrassed and pleased him a little.

“He wouldn’t know what things cost, would he?”

Ms. Fields-Hall’s posture in the wingchair – one of a pair whose cushions might once have cradled the buttocks of George the Third - was not one of ease, like some Bond villain. Still, it conveyed entitlement - along with authority and dignity.  As she spoke she turned her gaze to the Staffordshire spaniels by the fireplace. Her chin puckered then and Digget’s heart went out to her, despite it all.

“But… what was he doing wearing trainers?” There was a spark of hope in the question. “In his twenties his bill for Lobbs would have supported a third-world village. I don’t think he would have agreed to be cremated in a pair of trainers.”

 “Yes,” Digget said, surprised at the clumsy cremation reference, “Well, the waiter had noticed that they weren’t in keeping with the rest of his, uhm, presentation.”

“Quite a noticing sort of waiter, wasn’t he? A veritable Sherlock.”

“I suppose, yes.” Was she thinking that it would have been better, easier perhaps, if her brother had bubbled under unnoticed? “And, your brother replied, ‘I need shoes that will waterlog quickly and be impossible to slip off underwater.’

Silence.

 “The waiter told him to hold on – went to get his manager, but when they got back, your brother had gone.”

The silence deepened. It was too much for Jonas.

“We’re quite sure it was him, Ma’am, if that’s what you’re wondering. Of course you’ll have to come and ID the body, but he had his wallet on ‘im when they fished ‘im out.” Digget winced. “Only thing in it was his driver’s license.” Jonas handed this from the sofa where she and Digget perched to the wing chair. “And he still had on the basketball shoes,” Jonas said. She felt Digget’s little nudge and trailed off, “brand new.”

Ms. Fields-Hall regarded the license, with its postage-stamp sized photo of “Oliver F. Hall, 13 Acorralado Way, Unit 17B, Las Vegas.” A big horn sheep gamboled above Oliver’s right ear. “Nevada” was printed in type meant to suggest tree branches. 

“Yes,” Ms. Fields-Hall said flatly. “That’s him.”

Digget had grown up seven miles from where they all sat now, in the beeswax-smelling drawing room of Boald Park. He remembered his mother saying once that the Halls of Boald had “blood so blue a spoon would stand up in it.” He’d wondered at the time if that were literally true.  All the locals knew that Oliver had got to daggers-drawn with the rest of the family years ago and left the place. People had stopped asking about him, it had been that long.

 “You didn’t know he’d come back to England then?” Digget was all softness.

“No, Inspector. He didn’t contact me.” Ms. Fields-Hall smoothed her dungarees – she’d been gardening when they arrived. “He wouldn’t have, though.” She turned back to the spaniels. “He’d left a long time ago and the distance he’d gone was too far for returning.” She paused, “oysters and champagne as a last meal notwithstanding.”

And so that is how not to win a masterclass from the Guardian.  The winning entry and runners up (and don't try to tell me that the winner's real name is "Geoff Lavendar") can be read here.