Back to work

Anne Francis has died aged 80.



Sort of, we have a 3 hour presentation first thing this morning from the new guy who has taken over as principle.... 3 hours????? - and then at 4pm a meeting about room allocation that just might end badly - I have stuff to do in between - no point in coming home. On Wednesday it's something similar and then back to teaching on Thursday. I have work to do for a presentation in London next Friday and I'm working on a leisure project here in Sussex from Today too.

The Actress Anne Francis has died - anyone who has seen the Sci Fi Classic 'Forbidden Planet' will have strong memories of her. It's a brilliant film - astonishing early electronic music, with a script developed from The Tempest and the introduction of Robbie The Robot. The Effects are pretty good too.

I'm still having problems with my computer. It tends to crash if you let the cursor touch the corners of certain windows and it's making a funny noise at the moment as it chuggs through the RAM.

Horrible day outside, very dark, wet and overcast - shame, as we shall miss the partial eclipse of the sun this morning.

VAT goes up to 20% today. It's a complex, disorganised and opaque system that nobody understands. The bloke on the radio just described it as 'luxury' tax - so your biscuit may not have it - but a chocolate bar might, but it is on broadband, petrol, and many of the services we use daily. It's also applied to many services - so a big return to cash in hand, meethinks. Essentially - if you are poor or on an average age - a greater proportion of your income will be taken up by VAT than someone who is on a higher income. It's all shit. Rail fares go up today too -by as much as 16%. There are now significant numbers of people who pay 20-25% of their income in just getting to work every day. If I still commuted it would cost me £5,200 pa. That's just absurd - the service is slow, overcrowded and very unreliable. Even a quick trip to London now costs me £20. How is the country supposed to develop if it's crippled by a transport system that is practically Victorian - it's only a matter of time before the reintroduction of cattle class standing only steerage on the trains.

BTW. ( look - I done an acronym...) seeing as everyone else has had their say - I'm glad that Nigel Pargetter is dead ( I know, he'd not actually a real person ) it's a blessed release from the clutches of his shrill, selfish, spoiled wife. I hate Elizabeth and frankly wish he had fallen on her and killed her. She is one of the reasons I never listen to the Archers any more. I started falling out of love with the show when she complained that her parents wanted to give their farm to her brother when they retired - and she is so fucking righteous and self important - living in the big house and always complaining how hard everything is and how she has to do everything for herself. Poor bloody Nigel is in a much better place. Of course, now she has the opportunity to blame her brother for everything and we will have the whole 'family torn apart by tragedy' thread that will just go on and on and on... personally I'm boycotting until the episode where Pip ends up lap dancing in Fethesham to pay for her crack habit.


Pulled this from a column in The Daily Telegraph - I found it interesting... if you like Larkin.

At Christmas I received the recently published collection of Philip Larkin’s letters to Monica Jones, his girlfriend of nearly 40 years. When this newspaper ran excerpts from the collection, we naturally focused on the insights it gave us into the pair’s decidedly singular relationship (Larkin refused to marry her, and carried on with two other women behind her back). But through it there runs another intriguing theme: how scornful Larkin was about his own poems.
An Arundel Tomb, the one that famously ends “What will survive of us is love”, he dismissed as “embarrassingly bad”; Essential Beauty was “no good”, Here “dull”, Ignorance “v poor”, Sad Steps “pretty unoriginal”, Toads Revisited “bad” and Days “hardly a poem at all”. Even the magnificent Church Going, he complained, was “not entirely effective”. The Whitsun Weddings, his finest volume, was supposedly “a poor harvest for 9 years”. The highest praise he bestowed on his own work, in the course of his correspondence with Jones, was a brief remark about Waiting for Breakfast: “I don’t think it’s so bad as I used to.”
We know from the Selected Letters of 1992 that Larkin swarmed with self-loathing – but did he truly believe that these exquisite poems were rotten? I doubt it. I suspect that he was employing the standard tactic of the shy man: self-deprecation as a sly form of showing-off. Condemning his own poems let him do three things. One, to fish for compliments; two, to use attack as the best form of defence (by rubbishing his poems before Jones read them, he left her little room to find fault with them herself); and three, to make her think he was humble, v