Remembrance with Early Jingling Bells
I'm absolutely thronged at work at the moment. All sorts of projects are gathering heads of steam. My workstation is in the process of begin converted to Windows NT as a test bed for future developments to the service as a whole. I spent all day Thursday in Wolverhampton sorting out some stuff that will probably result in my getting some lucrative constancy work. Thank God, it will pay off the bill for all the electrical stuff we've just bought.
E-mail seems even more problematic at present which sort of suits my uncommunicative mood.
The major evidence for this came last week with the discovery that the phone had been out of order for goodness knows how long. I'd been delayed at work and was trying to ring Ross to let him know that I'd be late as he was cooking. Well, the phone kept ringing and there was no answer. When I got in, he was there and wondering where I'd got to. We picked up the phone and it was dead. Took British Telecom just a few days to sort it out.
Saturday I got progressively more and more tired. Probably the same bug that Ross had had earlier in the week. So, by 6pm I was in bed and quite glad not to go out and face up to Don Giovanni at Covent Garden.
Fourteen hours of straight sleep seemed to do the trick so Sunday was spent at the Mapplethorpe exhibition at the Hayward and Peter Greenaway's new film The Pillow Book. It was instructive seeing both in the same day. Both have an absolute mastery of their chosen craft and are technically absolutely flawless. But I found both quite chill emotionally. Personally I prefer something a little more rough and ready but with a bit more red meat on the bone.
Monday brought Remembrance Day and my thoughts turned over the events of the past two years. November 1994 and David and I were in Stratford-upon-Avon at the RSC, our only holiday together. Three days later he was in hospital and the light went out of his eyes.
It was sobering later that day to walk along Oxford Street and see just how far advanced the commercial side of the Festive season has already progressed. Lights are up, decorations are up, all the marketing in the shop windows is Christmas orientated. Those jingling bells you can hear are really the cash registers.