New Possession
17 May

This afternoon, I take possession of my new car.

Things have suddenly gathered pace. My old car was taken away yesterday; the courtesy car goes this morning; by the end of today, there will be a new car on the road in front of the house.

Last year, during the redundancies at work, Gill expressed the opinion that my reaction was disproportionate to the reality of my situation. She felt that it had a lot to do with very old material that I carry round inside of me.

Later in the year, I wrote the following in an email to Elizabeth, one of my Quaker friends

Currently, my own interior child is not very happy. He's re-living the lost and panicky feeling but is responding to the soothing and the urging to do something else and new by getting angry and spoiling things. He obviously needs a lot of love at the moment.

What I think has impressed me most about my reactions over the past three weeks is that I haven't taken the whole thing personally and have just simply experienced it. I got have gotten on with everything and, yes, I have accepted the help that has been offered but I haven't craved attention. I have felt little personal anger.

So, I move on.

After the success of The Naked Pilgrim, Ross and I approached The Grand Tour with some eager anticipation. It would be wrong to say that we were sorely disappointed. That would be overstating things. However, what had worked well as a series of six thirty minute television programmes worked less well as a series of ten hour-long programmes. Certainly programmes eight and nine were very thin in content and seemed to be stalling for time. In the first series, Brian Sewell had interesting things to say about the places and about the notion of pilgrimage. In this series, he seemed obsessed with the sexual shenanikins of young aristocrats in the eighteenth century. There was less art and more opinionating. It was still a cut above most television but only worth three stars.

Worth even less was Nigel Williams' They Came From SW19, billed as an hilarious novel but a dreadful disappointment. I remember reading his The Wimbledon Poisoner some years ago and rather liking it. I hope it wasn't as snide as I found this to be. It revelled in laughing at people in a most unappetising fashion. I'm actually sorry that I put in the time to finish it.