Now Cathy and I are both retired at last.

Just because it's pretty.

Click to embiggen.

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More from last summer in Sussex

Now that I am retired,

this is where I spend most of my life,

sitting in that chair by the fireplace.

You can see this computer,

open on the floor next to the chair.

Tall,

taller,

tallest

Inspired by the chair,

 I was pretending to be a typist in 1990

A long time ago, when I was young and unemployed, I visited my friend in Oxford. He later became a history don and at that time was living with three other highly intelligent youths. They were in their last year at the university. My intellect was not up to their standard, I had indeed been sent down for not being able to keep up, but they welcomed me into their little house and we laughed a lot. During the day they went off to tutorials and lectures and I examined their record collection. I found some Beethoven string quartets that I had never heard before and was enchanted by just one track, which I played over and over again. Since then I have looked for that track by buying collections of quartets, but never found it until today when I simply listened to every recording of string quartets on You Tube. I was so familiar with it then, years ago, for just a couple of days, that I can tell that it is played differently, but oh, what a pleasure to find it at last!
It is the second movement of op. 59 no. 3.

Congressman Denis Kucinich, Michael Moore, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzale, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, Larry Adler, Stella Adler, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Joseph Bromberg, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, Carl Foreman, John Garfield, Howard Da Silva, Dashiell Hammett, E. Y. Harburg, Lillian Hellman, Burl Ives, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Philip Loeb, Joseph Losey, Anne Revere, Pete Seeger, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Untermeyer, Josh White, Clifford Odets, Michael Wilson, Paul Jarrico, Jeff Corey, John Randolph, Canada Lee, Orson Welles, Paul Green, Sidney Kingsley, Richard Wright, Abraham Polonsky.

My friend James Davidson found me on Facebook and sent me these pictures. I had not seen him since I ran into him when I was twenty six and had not seen him for seven years before that. So these are either when I was twenty six or when I was eighteen. I have lost a lot of hair since then. As a teenager I hated my hair which was always growing in the wrong directions all over the place. I now realise that I was quite nice looking, but, at the time, because of acute acne and stiffness, I did not feel it at all.

Click on all to enlarge

Click on this for movement

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Huge lightning storm over the city last night

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When we were in Petworth House, I noticed the sensuous paintings by Peter Lely. There were only three on display. These are in Hampton Court. Petworth had a fine painting of Charles ll, who was his patron.