Friday, June 13, 2008
Return of the fatty
Friday June 13th. 23.56
It is not entirely obvious why there has been no blog for nearly six months or why I have chosen this moment to resume. I have been busy with other things, particularly the allotment and reading. I am of course still working and I do have a contract to work for another year at least.
First things first; has Bob lost weight? The answer is no, but he hasn't gained either. It is very nearly two years since the first blog and the weigh in at the service station on the M5 just north of the junction with the M50. I was then on my way to Kegworth the day before the Moto GP. I hope to repeat that journey for the same reason in a week's time. I haven't really been trying very hard to lose weight and my latest food enthusiasm is croissants. According to the blurb on the box, they are the best that Raymond Blanc has tasted outside his own kitchen! I wonder if that is really true. Does he really go shopping in Tesco stores? Unfortunately for the the keen slimmer, there are six in each box and they don't keep well overnight.
I was recently accused by the Tel part of StanandTel of reading only detective fiction and perhaps therefore of needlessly restricting the pleasures of reading, but there have been quite a number of novels and even short stories that I have consumed. Perhaps the most interesting short stories were two collections by Amy Hempel. 'The Dog of the Marriage' and 'Reasons to Live'. They are both quite short collections which come to an end far too quickly so I feel I can recommend them. I have a third collection of her's that came in the latest Amazon parcel.
I also greatly enjoyed Terry Pratchett's 'Making Money' but I can't warm to any of the other
Discworld Novels - or at least the ones I have tried so far. I believe that he thinks he has Alzheimer's Disease but how can he tell? I have also not enjoyed a biography of Max Perutz who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of Haemoglobin and a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The former irritated me because it portrays a man who seemed to be upset that he was not recognised sooner and that all he wanted was a Nobel Prize and derived no satisfaction from his work. He probably wasn't like that at all but that was how he was portrayed. The Oppenheimer book was simply too long and I lost the will to grind on long before the end. I have recently been informed that reading biography is a definite sign of ageing ' if not senility, so I won't be reading any more of them.
I had recently tried to ask Tel if he knew the stories of Ring Lardner which nobody but me ever seems to read but we had a rather confusing conversation about American short stories as we couldn't remember whether it was Robert Carver or Richard Coover. I have since found a collection of stories by Raymond Carver which is very readable and a book called 'Pinocchio in Venice' by Robert Coover which is quite unreadable incomprehensible tosh. No wonder that authors such as Anthony Burgess are quoted, praising this awful book. Anyway, I was told that Ernest Hemingway paved the way to the style of much of the American writing of the second half of the twentieth century so I am now reading 'Men Without Women' and have others lined up the second half of 2008. Would Elmore Leonard have been able to write his wonderful books if Hemingway had not been born before him? Did he really influence Philip Roth whose latest work was one of the great disappointments of the last six months ('Exit Ghost')?
I am always on the lookout for new and entertaing detective fiction but there is always a temptation to stick to one's favourites, Camilleri, Montalban, Garcia-Roza, Padura, Leon, Carofiglio, and even re-read Simenon and Chandler, so I'm always ready to try something new if recommended. I am trying some Chinese and Japanese detectives but they are fairly standard 'police procedurals', and although quite different froom the American or European police procedurals, there is no real excitement or thrill. Has anyone out there disovered anew and exciting detective fiction writer?
Since I first gave news of my allotment, there has been a lot of publicity for allotments and encouragement for people to dig up their lawns and plant vegetables instead of grass. I'm not sure if this is prompted by the price of food or simply by the enthusiasts for gardens and 'green' issues. I should point out that it takes quite a lot of time to look after a standard sized allotment and to make it productive. I have noted that a recent allotment holder on the site feels that it is perfectly OK to allow quite a lot of weeds and wildness on the allotment and sort of live in harmony with a balance of weeds and vegetables, but it seems to me that although he can do whatever he likes with the ground he rents, its against the principle of the allotment not to use it for cultivation of plants that aren't weeds. Furthermore it is rather anti-social to let the seeds from all his weeds blow on to other peoples' patches. Fortunately his plot is some way away from mine. I am expecting good crops this year, particularly of beans and raspberries. I have started an asparagus bed and when the digging is finished I plan to add a strawberry bed.
Congratulations to my sleeping partner who has recently fathered a baby girl. He visited the allotment once this year to look at it rather than do anything such as digging or hoeing. I can't see him actually doing anything there at least until I have finished the digging.
I hope to resume regular blogs from now on, so watch this space.
It is not entirely obvious why there has been no blog for nearly six months or why I have chosen this moment to resume. I have been busy with other things, particularly the allotment and reading. I am of course still working and I do have a contract to work for another year at least.
First things first; has Bob lost weight? The answer is no, but he hasn't gained either. It is very nearly two years since the first blog and the weigh in at the service station on the M5 just north of the junction with the M50. I was then on my way to Kegworth the day before the Moto GP. I hope to repeat that journey for the same reason in a week's time. I haven't really been trying very hard to lose weight and my latest food enthusiasm is croissants. According to the blurb on the box, they are the best that Raymond Blanc has tasted outside his own kitchen! I wonder if that is really true. Does he really go shopping in Tesco stores? Unfortunately for the the keen slimmer, there are six in each box and they don't keep well overnight.
I was recently accused by the Tel part of StanandTel of reading only detective fiction and perhaps therefore of needlessly restricting the pleasures of reading, but there have been quite a number of novels and even short stories that I have consumed. Perhaps the most interesting short stories were two collections by Amy Hempel. 'The Dog of the Marriage' and 'Reasons to Live'. They are both quite short collections which come to an end far too quickly so I feel I can recommend them. I have a third collection of her's that came in the latest Amazon parcel.
I also greatly enjoyed Terry Pratchett's 'Making Money' but I can't warm to any of the other
Discworld Novels - or at least the ones I have tried so far. I believe that he thinks he has Alzheimer's Disease but how can he tell? I have also not enjoyed a biography of Max Perutz who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of Haemoglobin and a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The former irritated me because it portrays a man who seemed to be upset that he was not recognised sooner and that all he wanted was a Nobel Prize and derived no satisfaction from his work. He probably wasn't like that at all but that was how he was portrayed. The Oppenheimer book was simply too long and I lost the will to grind on long before the end. I have recently been informed that reading biography is a definite sign of ageing ' if not senility, so I won't be reading any more of them.
I had recently tried to ask Tel if he knew the stories of Ring Lardner which nobody but me ever seems to read but we had a rather confusing conversation about American short stories as we couldn't remember whether it was Robert Carver or Richard Coover. I have since found a collection of stories by Raymond Carver which is very readable and a book called 'Pinocchio in Venice' by Robert Coover which is quite unreadable incomprehensible tosh. No wonder that authors such as Anthony Burgess are quoted, praising this awful book. Anyway, I was told that Ernest Hemingway paved the way to the style of much of the American writing of the second half of the twentieth century so I am now reading 'Men Without Women' and have others lined up the second half of 2008. Would Elmore Leonard have been able to write his wonderful books if Hemingway had not been born before him? Did he really influence Philip Roth whose latest work was one of the great disappointments of the last six months ('Exit Ghost')?
I am always on the lookout for new and entertaing detective fiction but there is always a temptation to stick to one's favourites, Camilleri, Montalban, Garcia-Roza, Padura, Leon, Carofiglio, and even re-read Simenon and Chandler, so I'm always ready to try something new if recommended. I am trying some Chinese and Japanese detectives but they are fairly standard 'police procedurals', and although quite different froom the American or European police procedurals, there is no real excitement or thrill. Has anyone out there disovered anew and exciting detective fiction writer?
Since I first gave news of my allotment, there has been a lot of publicity for allotments and encouragement for people to dig up their lawns and plant vegetables instead of grass. I'm not sure if this is prompted by the price of food or simply by the enthusiasts for gardens and 'green' issues. I should point out that it takes quite a lot of time to look after a standard sized allotment and to make it productive. I have noted that a recent allotment holder on the site feels that it is perfectly OK to allow quite a lot of weeds and wildness on the allotment and sort of live in harmony with a balance of weeds and vegetables, but it seems to me that although he can do whatever he likes with the ground he rents, its against the principle of the allotment not to use it for cultivation of plants that aren't weeds. Furthermore it is rather anti-social to let the seeds from all his weeds blow on to other peoples' patches. Fortunately his plot is some way away from mine. I am expecting good crops this year, particularly of beans and raspberries. I have started an asparagus bed and when the digging is finished I plan to add a strawberry bed.
Congratulations to my sleeping partner who has recently fathered a baby girl. He visited the allotment once this year to look at it rather than do anything such as digging or hoeing. I can't see him actually doing anything there at least until I have finished the digging.
I hope to resume regular blogs from now on, so watch this space.
