Lipsum

It's not to be Bourne

Bourne Again

It was Bourne upon me

Bourne Free (Bourne Three?)

I dunno - there may be something there, but I can't get it. (Captain Jack, on the other hand (Aubrey, not Harkness! What sort of a girl do you think I am!) would smoke it. I'm just not in his league.) Did Ludlum choose the name for its possibilities? Hmmm . . .

Sorry. Not paying attention there. SO and I have just watched all three Bournes on three successive evenings, and we are drained - drained, I tell you. (And while SO went to bed I caught up with Torchwood. Sometimes I don't know where I find the strength.)

Actually I wanted to tell you about the eventual (its been years coming. Years.) purchase of a USB turntable. I'm rather hoping that SO and I can get together in the library (with the lead pipe. And Colonel Plum. STOP IT.) tomorrow night and set the little beauty up, and finally start translating our lovely lovely vinyl collection into tidy sets of noughts and ones, ready for actually listening to. I can't tell you how much (well I can, obv., but then I really really can't tell you just how bored you'd be) I've missed Jack Buchanan, The Comedian Harmonists, Al Bowlly, the Christopher Hogwood Messiah, and Simon and Garfunkel. To name but a few.

Thank goodness that wretched earworm has gone. *sigh* only to be replaced by this one . . .

Shosholoza

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

Wen' uyabaleka

Ku lezontaba

Stimela siphum' eSouth Africa

The Three Rs

There's this bloke, who is - well, I guess he's a dustman. He works at some rubbish dump, and what he does, as other dustmen do, is sift through the stuff people throw away, I guess in the hope of making an easy buck. Well, this fellow sells his stuff on eBay - calls hisself summat like 'Reduce-reuse-recycle'. He makes it quite clear where his wares come from, and also that he is operating well within the law - what he does confirms to every guideline going.

He sells odd stuff - vinyls, bakelite phones, cutlery, and on this occasion, a beaten-up guitar. My friend (who told me this story) said it was in pretty sad shape, but on looking at the photos she found herself wondering if the pattern around the sound-box hole wasn't real honest-to-goodness inlay, and not the transfer most of us live with.

She kept an eye on the item, and wasn't altogether surprised when, a coupla days ago, the bidding hit £90. Well, the auction ended today, and the guitar was sold to a German buyer for



£820.01.

I love stories like that.

Another bloody birthday

January is a perfectly bloody month for birthdays. I've endured four already, and all with unnaturally high degrees of hands-on-ness demanded from me. Cooking and baking mostly (and the shopping before and the washing-up after and then the serving out and blimmin'eck more washing up didn't I just do some of this already?) .

And the present-buying, so soon after Christmas ha ha, except this year I discovered Amazon vouchers - now there's a present which says you care - well it would to me. (What on earth possessed them to call it Amazon? It's the first thing SO sees when he opens the credit card bills. Sometimes the second, third and fourth thing too. Now if it was called Valkyrie, say, it would be tucked neatly under the fold, and SO would have those monthly extra few seconds of his head not exploding. Again.)

And tomorrow is mine - Li'l Sis is cooking, huzzah, and to my immense relief SO has FINALLY explained to his mother the mechanics of the Amazon Wish List. Actually he did this before Christmas. How startled was I when, having opened her gift to me - which I normally do wishing desperately for a lead apron, a toughened-glass visor and extremely long tongs on account of having to unwrap, AND THEN FIND SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT, for instance a painting of such hideousness it makes vitreous humour leak out of your ears, or a hat, scarf and gloves set from Tie Rack fer Pete's sake - when has she ever seen me wear a - oh I get it. She thought I needed them.

Blast. I've put a full-stop now - two actually, if this was Word the screen would be all over green wiggly lines as the poor software looked desperately for a verb.

Be that as it may. This year, MiL's wrapping paper concealed Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, and David Lodge's 'Art of Fiction'. BLIMEY! I thought. If this isn't the most amazing co-incidence! How on earth did she come to choose two of the books I really want to read! So I'm approaching tomorrow with that particular weight off my mind.

And with a nod to I, Like the View, here are the lyrics to my current earworm -

It's not easy having yourself a good time
Greasing up those bets and betters
Watching out they don't four-letter
If I can kiss you both at the same time
Smells-like something I've forgotten
Curled up died and now it's rotten

I'm not a gangster tonight
Don't want to be a bad guy
I'm just a loner baby
And now you're gotten in my way

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

It's a bitch convincing people to like you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If lies were cats you'd be a litter
Pleasing everyone isn't like you
Dancing jigs until I'm crippled
Slug ten drinks I won't get pickled

I've got to hand it to you
You've played by all the same rules
It takes the truth to fool me
And now you've made me angry

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Oh I could throw you in the lake
Or feed you poisoned birthday cake
I wont deny I'm gonna miss you when you're gone
Oh I could bury you alive
But you might crawl out with a knife
And kill me when I'm sleeping
That's why

I can't decide
Whether you should live or die
Oh, you'll probably go to heaven
Please don't hang your head and cry
No wonder why
My heart feels dead inside
It's cold and hard and petrified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We're going for a ride

Sorry, Cicero.

Still haven't found out what happened to Grissom's squeeze, on account of all hell broke loose on another front. Well, when I say 'all hell', I mean someone else's irritation became my crisis.

One of the reasons I went all quiet, blogwise, for a bit was that I found a new toy - Serif WebPlus 10, to be precise. (Amazon sell it for £40, of course.) The last time anyone had had a go at a website for our Parish church it all ended in tears, so I offered to give it a go. It meant starting from scratch as the last person to try it had flounced off in such a huff that there was no way he was going to share any of the work he had already done (alas, for from the little I saw it was a nice job).

Knowing absolutely zip about websites and building them, it took me a bit of time to realise that the package we had (123-reg. Ugh. Horrible user interface, counter-intuitive site structure, ghastly instant-build options, answers to FAQs which tell you nothing apart from how to buy more of their services and a fantastically speedy and helpful support team. Bah.) was useless, then I had to work out what I could usefully use (WebPlus 10 - just lovely), and design the thing. The rector's brief was - well, brief. 'Orange and purple' he said. 'Orange and purple, with a picture of me.'

And then the content.

Ah me, the content. A while ago First Nations tagged me to to produce a list of ten authors who should be beaten with a bat until they STOPPED, and to my shame, Cicero was on there. (To my embarrassment, one of the reasons, and the specific reason for this apology, doesn't get a mention in that poorly-worded post.)

'Qui tacet, consentiret'. 'He who is silent, agrees.' Or, 'I'll take that as a Yes then, shall I?' Poor sod delivered his unarguably beautifully cadenced speeches to a houseful of Senators, not one of whom had the courage / could be arsed to express an opinion. Imagine. You take ages over a presentation, you write reams of words on subjects you know NOTHING about, because the person who does know, won't do it, and when, heaven forfend, someone does offer you some information you spend ages trying to turn the sow's ear of clerical prose into the silk purse of - well, something that makes sense, and no-one expresses an opinion. They just sit there. You ask, and ask, and ask 'Is this right'? 'Should I change this?' 'What do you think?' AND NO-ONE SAYS ANYTHING. Oh they might murmur the occasional 'Well Done', but contribute? Nuh-Uh.

I'm ranting, aren't I?

The point being, that two weeks before I'd planned to make the site live, Rector calls, all of a dither, saying he needs the site up NOW. So that's taken care of all the idle moments in the last three days, and I still don't know whether I've done it right. On account of, any changes to do with DNS take 24 - 48 hours to propagate across the net. I need the domain name to point away from the (ghastly) temporary page supplied by 123 (phtui) (that's spitting by the way) and at the actual domain where I've uploaded the site. I think. So by this time tomorrow, I'll know if I've delivered what I promised I could, or whether my name is actually Mud.

The Price of Integrity

Who was it who was recently talking about guilty pleasures? Gosh - maybe it wasn't in blogworld at all - maybe it was RL. Ooh - if it was, that might be a fun tag.

Well, one of mine is CSI. The Las Vegas and Miami variations, anyway. LV because Gil Grissom has me ensorcelled by his wisdom and integrity, and Miami because Horatio Caine makes my jaw drop with the vastness of his self-delusion (and Calleigh Duquesne. My oh my.) And last night saw the terrestrial opener to CSI:LV Series 8, which I recorded and should be watching right now instead of blimmin' blogging, on account of the cliffhanger at the end of the last series was SO GREAT.

I read somewhere (Wikipedia this is not. You'll just have to take my word that the following is absolutely true) that the lovely Jorja Fox, having been promoted AT LAST to Main Squeeze, asked (gasp) for a MASSIVE payrise. And do you know what the series bosses did?

They put her character under an overturned car, leaking petrol, in the middle of the Nevada desert. The final shot of the last series was her slender arm reaching out and ever-more-feebly scrabbling in the sand.

HA! That'll show her.

Or will it? . . .

Excuse me while I go find out . . .

AIBU?

Here's one I never met before. Undoubtedly something that everyone in the whole world knows except me, has done for ages and by now its so fuckin' passe that no-one uses it any more so I should just go get a life, ok?

Sorry.

I just hate when that happens - something pops up all over the damn' place and you have no idea what it means, and it takes you bluddy ages to figure out what everyone else is going on about. Well, not you, obv., I mean me, on account of you had it sussed ages ago, didn't you, you smug know-it-all git. Or else, like Betty or Reg you have absolutely no need of it AT ALL.

Sorry.


AIBU?

There's this place called Mumsnet. Not my sort of place at all really - a parenting forum for those who dunno what to do when little Samantha won't stop biting the heads off lizards, or baby Sebastian who is only three but is halfway through the Narnia series and wants to learn Greek, what shall I do! Bleurgh.

Except every so often, a whole bunch of them completely go off on one. Someone starts a thread and it spirals out of control, and my friend who actually does seriously visit the place sends me a link - like this one, and I end up with aching ribs and a runny nose from weeping with laughter. Dang, these women can be funny.

And here was where I found this never-before-seen abbreviation. I did make the (IMHO) reasonable leap that it hadn't been invented solely for this particular thread, and is to be found in general usage on the rest of the site. Is this a particularly parenting thing? A defence mechanism to use when you know you are, or a rallying cry from a lone voice of reason in a topsy-turvy world? It cropped up an awful lot, and I was left wondering whether parenthood turned otherwise reasonable people into needy passive-aggresives riddled with self-doubt?

Or Am I Being Unreasonable?

I'm with Moses

In the dark. Something is wrong with the fuse for the kitchen lights, they haven't been on all day, and I can't see a damn' thing. So cooking is chancy, washing-up decidely sub-standard, and blogging totally out of the question.

But look what I found in my library book! I saw the dedication first, and wondered that such a gift would have found its way, clearly unread, into the county stock. And then I notced the autograph, and I can't help feeling that this is some terrible mistake, and out there is some anguished William really wanting his book back. The way I see it, I have two options - a) tell a librarian, or b) pay the lost book fine, and change my name to William by deed poll.

Hmmmm . . .

Where's the Groom

. . . or, What to Do When Your Secret Husband Dies Five Days Before the Wedding Celebration.

Very uncharted territory, this. You generally know the form when people get married, or someone dies, or is fired, or wins the World Cup. You shake hands, you hug, you go for a beer, you go for a beer. But a secret husband popping his clogs five days before the wedding breakfast? With people coming in from all over the place? And what on earth do you do about a present?

The reports from South Africa just kept gettting worse - my cousin Mark was not responding well to his chemotherapy. He had a stroke, and died. Li'l Sis and I flew out as planned, trotted along to the venue at the appointed time, and the whole thing went ahead exactly as planned. Except no groom. Not an inch of black to be seen, a breezy disco track for muzak, and a bride in all her finery. The speeches delivered by grown men who cried - not a bad tribute either.

Li'l Sis and I were seated with Mark's sons, both splendid young men just starting their legal careers, both articulate, beautifully-mannered and charming.

Later that evening we dined with Mark's sister, who filled us in on the relationship between the family and the bride, including the name-calling, the crockery-chucking, and the bride throwing her out of her house, yelling '... and Mark didn't leave his sons anything! I inherit it ALL!' Apparently on the grounds that they would just drink any money. Oh - and the secret wedding, four months before.

Unsurprisingly, Mark was only monied because, having been sunk deep into debt by child support payment for wife #1, and the extravagances of wife #2, it was wife #3 who pushed him into a better job, managed his finances and used her own money to help pay off his debts. She, however, proved faithless, leaving the way open for wife #4 to scoop the lot.

When I spoke to my mother about the disinheriting of the two extremely well-presented sons, she rather shocked me by agreeing with the opinion of the shrewish widow, and saying that this opinion was held by the majority of the older members of the family.

I swear, the reason we love all our family as much as we do, is that we live several thousand miles away. How on earth else can you do it?

But I didn't go all that way to come back empty-handed. Here's a couple of pictures for you - the first one in the best PUH-ssible taste. Hung in a jeweller's shop, I cannot honestly remember the last time I saw anything so crass.

And the second one hung outside a mall-cum-casino, all tricked out to look like a small corner of Venice, with fake houses, real restaurants, acres of real one-armed bandits, and a 'sky' painted to look like late afternoon - wait a minute, I've a picture somewhere -

(Li'l Sis said it reminded her of Las Vegas, only not so classy.) The sign outside said


I did have to stop and breathe quite deeply when I saw that one. I wondered what would happen if the opposite notice was hung inside - ' You are now entering a gun-ridden area - Gun safes are openly derided. Stick-ups will be carried out'. I think I'd still be inside.

Out of the mouths

It fell to me to do the Karate run the other day. (I occasionally tend to three children. Dull story.) The boys do the karate, and I keep the girl amused. No sweat. We happened to be watching the lesson, and she remarked on one of the boys (for the class was composed entirely of the little beasts) saying that it was the chap in the white shirt. Of which there being many, I asked for further classification. Look, she said, the one with the blue belt, doing the kick. I saw exactly the fellow she meant.

She was pointing out the only boy black boy in a sea of white.

It clearly didn't occur to her that this was a valid distinction, or if she even saw it, it was not worthy of notice. This cheered me up NO END.

Is it just them, or is it all of them?

There's this bloke in the village - pleasant fellow, tall, fair, nice looking. Pung, his name is.* He and his wife are independent barristers, they have two kids, a bunch of grandmas and a lodger. He is quintessentially English - courteous, unassuming, a self-deprecating sense of humour and - this is where it goes off the rails a tiny bit - he is an armchair Liberal Democrat.

Or was. He, it transpires, had been dallying with the idea of actually getting up out of his armchair, and actually standing (for parliament - this metaphor could run and run). What with election fever gripping the nation, for a few days anyway, our man hurtled into action, dishing out questionnaires and buttonholes and glad hands like a man possessed. And at every turn, well some turns anyway, he was asked if he was working with Tonk**.

'Tonk??' Pung would cry. 'Who he?'

'Dontcherno?' would come the startled reply. 'He's Ming's*** right hand man, his policy adviser, the speechwriter who inserts all the jokes that Ming takes out. He lives just round the corner.'

How about that then. A local bloke wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP didn't know that Menzies Campbell's chief policy adviser was living in the same village, and the chief policy adviser didn't know that a local bloke was wanting to stand for Lib Dem MP.

Is this just the Lib Dems, or the Labs and Cons too? It doesn't inspire confidence, it has to be said.

* No of course it isn't.
** Not his real name either.
***Nope, not his real name, but his real nickname.

Condolences

How on earth do you write a letter of condolence when you are pretty sure that the bereaved person is actually giddy with glee?

My cousin in South Africa had a marriage which had been going sour for a long time. She's 49, has two children in their early twenties, and a husband who was a model of unreconstructed afrikaner boer. Not interested in his growing children, he required a tidy house, a beer, a relax and hot food at the end of his working day, and sex every other day, regardless of how she felt. And as many affairs as he felt like. (Any male readers out there? NO. THIS IS NOT A CIVILIZED ATTITUDE.) She has been trying to get out for the last five years or so, but he has been - well, unhelpful. For the last couple of years she has been living in friends' houses, sleeping on sofas.

He died two days ago. His son found him in the morning, still in his tracksuit from the previous night's jog. He was 53. (And his name was Frikkie. South Africans have an outlandish idea of what is acceptable in a name for a male.)

Knowing that her e-mail address is a work one and not secure, and even though I bet she is probably doing cartwheels of joy, I had to go with the 'I'm so very sorry' schtick, when what she wants is an airline attendant called Sebastian in extremely tight leather trousers singing 'Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!'

Bleak House

The best thing about having a rattle-trap of a car (in them thar days. I drive a sensible car now.) was the sound effects. Or rather, what the engine noise did to the music.

I'm not much of a one for pop music. Late baroque / classical gets my vote, with the occasional nod to Late Classical / Romantic types like Verdi. So I'm talking about music with a lot of layers. Complexities. Dimensions. Stuff it actually pays to listen to -I mean it doesn't really do as aural wallpaper.

So, cruisin' an' playin' my radio, it became apparent that the engine noise was masking certain musical frequencies, usually the highest ones, the ones that played the recognisable tune. And what I was left with were the lower lines. Not helpful if I was listening to a sonata of any sort, or, say, one of Bach's cello suites, but a symphony? Wow. My head could fill in the missing parts but all of a sudden I could hear the music from a totally unfamiliar angle - the bass lines, the harmonies, the musical sub-plots - and my admiration and reverence for Beethoven and Haydn and Mozart and Verdi exploded.

Same sort of thing is happening now. I finally started watching the recent BBC take on Bleak House. I put it off for ages because the novel is one of my favourite Dickenses and I didn't want a disappointment (and I have fond memories of the last one they did). But Wow again - the adaptation is excellent, it looks gorgeous, the acting is top notch AND it's doing that thing that my car engine did. It's changed my focus on the book, and made me see structures and characterisations that I hadn't seen before. I never expected to feel a flash of sympathetic understanding for Tulkinghorn, or to despise Richard Carstone quite so heartily, or to see the malice seeping from Skimpole so clearly.

And best of all, it makes me want to re-read the book NOW. Can't say fairer than that.

Recent boats I have missed

Why on earth bother to take out large ads telling me that John Lithgow (John Lithgow! Himself!) will be doing Malvolio at Stratford when they know damn well that the run lasts one more week and all the tickets have gone anyway? Just what is that supposed to prove? Is it some sort of bottom line thing? Measuring their success by my disappointment? And I was, you know. Gutted.

And the Terracotta blimmin' Army. Turn your back for a minute and all the tickets have gone. Pfft. Just like that. Well, apart from the two on eBay, and I can't go that day. (Why only the two on eBay? I'd have thought there'd be a roaring trade in them. No tickets at all for Twelfth Night. Just what good is eBay anyway? Can never find anything I want.)

Hmph.

You do the math

Significant Other and I have decided that, actually, it's quite rude to take wine when invited to a dinner party. It implies that one's host is either too poor to afford a bottle, or will provide rubbish wine, or, indeed, is too stupid to notice that you have brought a bottle of undrinkable because CHEAP vino di merda.

But you have to take something, neh? A little box of six handmade chocolates, a teeny posy of seasonal flowers, maybe organically cultivated, fairly traded pecan nuts wrapped in handblocked mango-leaf paper. You know the sort of thing. Which is all wonderful, but how do you carry it? How do you present it to your host? Especially when that box of handmade chocolates is actually quite teeny when compared with a bottle.

Well, you put it in a brown paper bag, don't you? Not just any old bag mind you, but something a little more classy, bit more up-market, know wha' I mean? Something with handles.

Google, bless it, came up with a number of possibilities. Comparison being the order of the day, and remembering that package and postage count, calculator at the ready, I found some good quality, well-constructed nice looking bags at seven pee a pop. Seven! What a great deal, eh? In went the order, Paypal did its thang, and here I am, awaiting delivery of 500 small brown paper bags, with handles, due tomorrow.

Hang on a mo' though. 500? Five? Hundred? OK. Just how many DPs do we get invited to anyway? Seriously. At a generous estimate, I'd say five a year. Including reciprocation, (where a brown paper bag with handles wouldn't count) that makes 10 social occasions a year - sounds about right. Which means we would use the final bag in 83 years and four months time.

Holy crap! I Just thought - how big is the package going to be?

My Mother-in-Law

or:

A Problem Shared is a Problem Doubled.

After much thinking, I've decided to use the words she herself used. You don't know the players, and the incident concerned is not, sadly, isolated. The woman under discussion, let's call her Jane, whom I have met a few times, is small and pretty and engaging and funny and generally charming. She has a feckless husband, three problem children and is prone to quite serious accidents. She is a friend of MiL's DD (Dear Daughter).

The scene: our dinner table, over cheese and biscuits.

MiL: DD told me that years ago Jane was assaulted and buggered with a bottle. No wait - it may have been the other end, but there . . .



My jaw still drops when I replay that conversation in my head. How could she do that?

Isn't it a wonderful thing to have friends? People with whom you feel safe enough to expose your frailties, who will love you anyway, and with whom the sharing of a problem is indeed a burden lifted. It is also a wonderful thing to have a mother with whom you can discuss pretty much anything, without fear of betrayal. No wait . . .

See? Right there. That's the problem with saying anything to anyone. They pass it on to someone they trust, who passes it on to someone else, who doesn't know you well, if at all, and suddenly The Thing that rules the dark corners of your life is the subject of after-dinner conversation among your slight acquaintance.

Hey, did you hear that Isabel had eight miscarriages? Eight! No, but I heard Joe was impotent. Hasn't been able to get it up in two years. Oh, and Steve still wets the bed! And he's twenty-nine! And Barbara can't stand her own daughter, who let's face it is a bit of a slut. Oh, and Jane got buggered by a bottle. Wow, that's really bad luck. Coffee, anyone?

Old Potatoes

See what happens when you leave stuff you should be cherishing and looking after and keeping up to date, or at least cutting up, boiling and eating, neglected for too long? It grows long white funny bits, and no-one wants to know any more. (Makes a pretty picture though, neh?)

On the subject of vegetables, the other day I found myself in tears while I was chopping the onions for supper. They were my own very first home-grown onions (an abundant crop - thank goodness I make terrific red onion marmalade) and it occurred to me that I hadn't cried over an onion in absolutely ages. Now, the thing about the huge supermarkets is that they are, to a significant degree, consumer lead. Did enough of us really get up on our hind legs, and whine that we didn't wike onions that made us cwy? Weally? And did the supermarket behemoths, in all their might and majesty, command an eradication of sulfenic acid? I mean, don't get me wrong, the tears I cried were oh-oh-that-burns-argh-ouch-bloody-hell-fucking-onions tears, right enough, but until that moment I had forgotten that that is what onions are supposed to do. Fucking supermarkets.

Golly, so much to say - the latest appallingness of my MiL, The Adventures of Mango in Wonderland, iTunes - Just How Far Behind The Times Am I?, FaceBook - Is It Just Me, Or Is It Really Rubbish?, the cultural indigestion caused by seeing HP5 and Downfall in the same week - where do I start?

Wow

I loved this. And this.

Blog? What blog??

. . . ah yes - this one.

What's to say? It rained, the sun shone, it rained again. SO got a job - did I mention that? Actually I did, elsewhere on the interweb-thingy, saying, approximately, that he had a new, exciting, slightly-over-his-head (but-in-a-good-way) senior senior job with (insert company name here) (AND THEN TURN IT INTO A LINK).

Oh No! I had completely forgotten the sort of software (see? I know it exists but I have NO idea of what it's called) that trawls the web looking for mentions of your website. One way of looking at it is that his new employers know I just called my Significant Other incompetent in front of the whole world.

OR, and this is the interpretation I myself prefer, the company is actually so huge that they probably don't run this software anyway.

Thank goodness my infinitely competent sister went vociferously for option b). SO much prefers to believe anything when I'm not the one saying it.

Also, well, I guess there were the Perseids - SO and I lying on the trampoline at eleven o'clock at night, not nearly well wrapped up enough, staring into the light-polluted sky and marvelling at the unparalleled beauty of the aeroplane lights - a major benefit of living so close to a flight path. Our viewing was totally undistracted by random shooting stars, thank goodness. They get so in the way of a decent bout of plane-spotting, dontcha find?

You win some, you lose some

We missed Audley End. Extremely irritatingly, it was shut. Three days a week! Ha - I knew we were right to join the National Trust. Those English Heritage dossers are an idle bunch.

To SO's delight, the next possibility was Duxford Air Museum (by that point I didn't care, as long as it involved lunch). Being as how the major exhibits are all aircraft, the place is huge. We got to see inside a prototype Concorde, and ride on an electric train from one end of the museum to the other.

I found myself profoundly disturbed by the Land Warfare exhibition, which concentrated on WWII and the Normandy Landings. (I know. At my great age.) I know we weren't in there for that long, and certainly didn't see absolutely everything, but nowhere in all the diagrams and pictures and video footage that I saw was there any mention of the lives that were lost. No idea at all of the scale of human destruction. Yes, I understand that small children would be quite unjustifiably frightened by graphic representations, but no mention of the dead at all? It seems such a blatant omission, and such a cynical one. I don't understand why veterans' groups don't make a bigger deal of this.

Argh

My Aralia Elegantissima

My mother-in-law's Aralia Elegantissima