Once Works Well was pure technology. Now it seeks merely to divert.
Pansy subjects - Verse! Opera! Domestic trivia! - are now commonplace.
The 300-word limit for posts is retained. The ego is enlarged

Friday 25 March 2011

Put not your faith in chic plumbing

FASHIONABLE SINK, part 2. Installed in the en suite at a high level so I may spit toothpaste accurately without bending. So high that Grandson Zach cannot reach the taps and has complained. What the heck, there are other sinks in the house. A plug and chain would be atavistic bling so the plug is a pusher: down for closed, down again for open. Now the plug action jams. Fashion failing to follow function.

FOUR STARS Social Network is a movie about the evolution of Facebook, an Internet facility I have never used. It got rave reviews but it’s about youth’s arrogance and I didn’t expect to like it. The first ten minutes, where two Harvard undergrads destroy themselves socially in a noisy restaurant needed sub-titles. The movie is ugly, monomaniacal and esoteric; it is also a brilliant take on one aspect of life in the twenty-first century. The script, where heard and decoded, was utterly inevitable and written by Aaron Sorkin, who famously wrote The West Wing.

THE LOVE PROBLEM 38, 348 words. Chapter Seven: No flying; Jana involved in Sunday lunch at the Bayonne house where she lodges with a French family. Terrible wine. Flowers for grandmother’s grave.

Imaginary birthday present for me: Magician directs Jana to a diner in New Jersey where we meet in the flesh for breakfast. Juice and the cornucopia-coffee-cup to begin with. She reserved and slightly suspicious, no less so when I reach out, take her hands and kiss her stubby finger-ends, saying: “Speak, angel!” (Angel is her loving mother’s preferred term of affection).

Germ of the next novel: A handsome, skilful woman is struck down professionally and rehabilitated.