Click on these to enlarge...Well worth it

I long for the magnolias. It'll be a while....





Apparently there is a Buddhist Bollywood film. Sounds perfect for my simplistic take on this great philosophy. Has anyone seen Asoka?

It seems Steph proposed a meme to JP Deni before several others got in on this great one. I asked JP to interview me, but she needed a little time to get to know my blog. I am thrilled now to get the questions. Now:

1. We know that you have excellent taste in music. What sort of musical background do you have?
Oh no. Lynette got quite cross with me because I thought that Mozart seemed like classical pop.
I failed miserably at piano, trumpet and guitar lessons when I was a boy. When I was sixteen, I recorded the Brandenburg concertos from 78s and we took this bulky tape recorder with us on a ski-ing holiday. I broke my leg the first day and spent the three weeks listening and reading Goodbye To All That, as usually, very slowly. Thus Bach is always associated for me with a rather austere bleakness, which I find very moving, but pleasantly detached.
It was, I suppose, film music which really turned me on to orchestral music and some serious composers. I also worked as a documentary film editor for a few years and we were often very free with the music we chose for those wordless sequences. It turned out that we payed very little copyright on electronic music because the musicians did not regard electronic manipulators as instrumentalists. I also had tapes of John Cage and Ligetti and, earlier, Leadbelly given to me by producers. The one genre I know very little about is, in fact, pop, apart from the Beatles and Mamas and Papas. Through my wife, I have come to love Country and Bluegrass. My Mp3 player is very... varied.
2. What was the first difference that struck you when you moved from England to North America?
Oh good questions, well worth waiting for. Um. I thought everything here was thinner. Bacon slices, toilet paper, wooden doors basically made out of cardboard and tightly folded paper. Electric plugs, with half the voltage of England, can afford to be very simple, relatively cheap things. On the other hand, gas has always been half the price of petrol. My salary here for the same job was four times what it had been In England.

3. What is the best part of being a dad?
Well, starting with birth; after the doctor, I was the first to hold our first born. He was entirely calm. As his eyes opened to his new world, I soaked his face with tears of joy that seemed to jet right out of my eyes. I'd never cried like that.Then I stayed at home with him until he was three. House husbands have a lot of fun, their lives slow right down to the baby's pace and, out in public, they can enjoy very high status from women. And then they multiplied. Each is different. I watch them grow and, in little ways, I grow them. They have deepened my love for their mother. I was forty when I had my first child and, by then, had come to assume that no one would want to have children with me. The sorrow I felt for myself then is way surpassed by the love I have for the richness of my life now.

4. What would you do during a day when you had absolutely no commitments at all and could do whatever you wanted to?
Sleep late, make love, eat all meals out, see a movie in the afternoon and go to a play in the evening. I'd still go to bed as early as possible.

5. What would an ideal double feature at the movies be for you?
:) :) I didn't look at these questions ahead of answering them. Um. I have a yearning for the double bills of my youth. The English government insisted that an English film be shown with every American film in secondary release. So I would see rather cheaply made gangster films in black and white along with slick Hollywood color films. I'm cheating already... I would start with Passport to Pimlico, eat an ice lolly and watch some advertising and pathetic trailers and then settle into....the red curtains open... and....I watch.... Dr Zhivago. Actually I saw the end of it about twelve times, as I found a way to sneak into the theatre well after it had started. I was never bored.

And, once again, here are the rules:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Books.

I just read Fancy French's post here.

Early on my mother tried hard to get her sons to read books. She had read "Le Rouge et le Noir" when she was five, she claimed. I was a little dyslexic anyway I now know, but nevertheless my brothers and I only yearned to read, (or look at the pictures in), more comic books. When she found them, she would throw them out, so that we invented the most ingenious places to hide them.

It was when I was away at school, that I discovered the pleasure of reading, but what I wanted to write about was the absolute thrill of two English libraries.

When I was nineteen, my mother remembered that she had a life time membership in what was called "The London Library". We lived then in Soho, so it was quite close. It had a good stock of expensive art books and, best of all, there was rarely anyone there. It probably survived on all those "life memberships" from the thirties.

Later a friend advised me that you could get a pass for the reading room of the British Museum. That one was well attended. What a thrill. I handled an exact copy of Da Vinci's drawings in the stacks, which at that time were not closed to the public. I spent two days there I will never forget.

Here in Toronto, you can order any book, CD, video tape or DVD that they have in the city and have it delivered to your local. Is it now thus in London?

Flapdoodle was asked by Steph to show her desktop. Here is mine on our old desktop Dell. The laptop still has the one that came with it from Samsung. Mine is useful , in that the left edge is dark. Cathy took it on our first day in Paris. Someone asked someone what their perfect day would be. Mine would be in Paris, unless I ever get to Cape Verde.

Indigo, blue, turquoise, purple. Starting a bit larger than the moon, in expanding circles or auras. At the outside a dull straw like yellow. Anyway, "indigo blue turquoise purple", is my new mantra.

I want to remind myself later of two things this week.

On Monday the sun was setting as my train rolled round the lake. It was an absolutely clear winter evening and the sun was about twelve times its normal size, sort of bright orange and I could look straight at it without straining my eyes. Interrupted by buildings on the horizon, it went slowly down to a half sun and then very quickly sank. The illusion was that the sun was moving and the earth not.

Last night the ground was covered with slush and salt, or whatever GO uses and , as I went down the stairs at the station I was thinking,"It's going down the stairs, it's looking at the steps, it doesn't want to fall, it's experiencing all its little ailments", and so on. This mood lifted the me in "it", as it still does today.

It has been a hard week at work as two lovable clients died. DW died in bed, actually a little while back, and it was expected, but JM died in a horrible, very painful, freak accident. We can only hope that he was sufficiently intoxicated to be freed from some of the pain, but it remains doubtful. The police were very sympathetic.

His friend JP, (their names rhymed), cried all day and drank heavily. We didn't discourage him, hoping that he might pass out, (we've never done this before), but actually, he didn't until three in the afternoon, after drinking enough to kill any one of us.