Reading, Drinking and Gambling

Books

I have just re-read “Little Man – What now?”, a story about a young couple struggling to make a living in Germany in the early 1930, prior to the Nazis taking over. There are no jobs around, the bosses are in charge, and the Nazis and communists are having punch-ups everywhere. This is a different, newer translation from the one I read before, and seems to be more modern in attitude, and is more liberal as to what is included. It was probably very shocking in 1932! There is an interesting moment when the man’s girlfriend tells him that her brother and everyone at her school always told her that she was unattractive – and he thinks she’s very beautiful, but this makes him think. Perhaps, no matter what we may say to the contrary, we are, to some extent, influenced by other people’s views? He also quotes a “silly expression” which is used by the people in his cold windy part of Germany, “It’s good that houses are hollow, otherwise we would not be able to live in them.” In fact, it was just so silly that it made me laugh. :)

I have also recently read “The Crossroads” by Niccolo Ammanti, a strange story of three alcoholic lowlifes and one of them’s 13 year old boy in a small Italian town earlier this century. Apart from the boy, none of the characters are sympathetic and the novel was rather violent, drunken and very depressing. I seem to have read several books involving heavy drinking recently, including the classic “The Lost Weekend”, “The Drinker” by Hans Fallada and “The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce”, which I actually bothered to review on Amazon and started, “I rather enjoyed the early parts of this story with Wilberforce's casual acceptance of ordering a bottle of wine worth £3,000 and knocking out the restaurant staff with his casual acceptance of this figure, plus a few additions of other "minor" wines. I was further impressed with his easy calculation of the number of units of alcohol he was consuming, when questioned, based on his four bottles of wine per day consumption.”

The Drinker? Well, he drank quite a lot too.. I also very much enjoyed reading Hans Fallada’s “All Alone in Berlin”, when the Nazis were actually in power, a frightening story. Not many people drank too much in that.

Politics

Just can’t keep away from ‘em! I just emailed Vince Cable to congratulate him on today’s remarks about “nauseating businessman”, “Brown kowtowing to the City”, etc. Excellent stuff! Of course, we’re now kowtowing to the credit rating agencies too- the guys who gave AAA ratings to bundled sub-prime loans!

Summer has officially arrived!

Today is the first day since last September that I’ve worn my lightweight jacket over my T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms down to the gym instead of my heavyweight black anorak! :) Heavyweight black anorak? Probably Mike Tyson with his pigeons.

Golf

Crikey! US Masters has now gone completely mad with two English blokes in front, neither of whom is old or fat! (Although Lee Westwood used to be quite rotund.)

Grand National on BBC and other gambling

3.45: Clare Balding has just said that “this year there are just so many good stories about the Grand National”. Just a pity, Clare, that you don’t seem to have any of them.

4.30: Four horses backed and none of them in the first four! Bugger! I made a profit of over 100 quid at the Cheltenham Festival.

Honestly, it’s not sour grapes, but why did the commentators have to shout their way right through the race. Surely, the first three miles (!) aren’t that exciting? Those fences look pretty horrendous though. They looked pretty bad at Wolverhampton when I was playing hockey at the racecourse there many years ago. To be fair, I’m not sure whether anything actually looks good in Wolverhampton.

Anyway, why should I care? Yesterday I won £5.50 in the Euro Millions (?) Lottery from just a £10 investment. More annoyingly, I had the first two out of the hat, out of the bag, electronically indicated, ball rolled, or whatever it is. Oh, the agony. 44 and 23, since you ask. Which, coincidentally, happen to be the same ages of me and my second wife when I got married again.

First Post - 8 April 2010

Hi, just starting this blogging lark today, I hope it’ll be fun and that I don’t upset too many people and don’t make too many idiot mistakes. I have ignorance and stupidity in clubs! (Sometimes in bars and restaurants as well.)

Introduction

A bit of background. I’m a bloke somewhat over 50 and a very early user of computers, starting with “mainframes” of around 64k, yes “k”! Being now unemployed, I read a lot of books, mainly history and crime novels, and have just ended a fixation with the city of Berlin.

I used to play a lot of hockey, but now just lumber around the gym, doing ab curls and cycling along to “Frasier” on early-morning TV. Actually, I’m a big fan of Seinfeld, and have even written a couple of disastrous sit-coms of my own, which went absolutely nowhere.

I have flirted briefly with learning various languages, e.g. French, Italian, Russian. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that I made a furtive, indecent approach to them, but I still frequently flick over my Russian notes.

I have lived in several parts of the country, but as I suffer from the rare disease of “alphphobia” it means that I can’t live anywhere beyond the letter “E” in the alphabet. So, amongst other places, I have lived are Bath, Banbury, Birmingham, Chester, Darlington, Exmouth and Aurora (Colorado), but I would struggle in Falmouth, and certainly couldn’t cope at all with Gateshead.

BBC goes horse-racing at Aintree today

I was listening to Radio 5 earlier this afternoon and heard Richard Bacon say that there was going to be some “interesting racing here at Aintree today”. Apparently, this was because there were some horses running owned by footballers! For BBC TV, horse-racing is more of a celebrity event than a sport, and is incomplete without either The Queen, Ricky Tomlinson or John Parrott, preferably all three. Luckily, with half an hour between races – rather than just a quarter of an hour on Channel 4 – there’s plenty of time left to talk to all these celebs, and, if you’re at Ascot you can wear silly clothes for a week as well.

Great! It's another Election!

Why does everything else in the media have to be so dominated by a British (or US) election? It’s just a vote – usually meaningless, as more that two thirds of the constituencies are “safe” – every 5 years and Ill be voting the same as last time around. That’s unless a feel a sudden, frivolous urge to go Monster Raving Loony. I’m informed the whole thing’s going to be decided by the grey vote, or the women’s vote, or Motorway Man, or possibly The Headless Horseman. Anyway, before calling the damned thing shouldn’t Gordon have checked that ER was in Buck House, rather than dragging back the dear old soul from her Easter hols in Windsor? Incidentally, why do the Royal Family have (some of) their homes in boring places such as Norfolk or Scotland? Someone reliably informed me that when they’re up in Balmoral over the Christmas hols, they only have coal fires: always have just porridge (made with water and a single pinch of salt) for breakfast; but insist on fresh strawberries (and cream) for tea, which are specially flown in from South Africa every day.

Why is there no interest in European elections, especially if we are now ruled from Brussels as everyone on the right says? I would find it fascinating – and almost certainly so would UKIP – to find out what fascist Italian porn stars and wishy-washy Belgian bookkeepers were governing us.

Eggheads is on TV

Interesting. On TV tonight a team from the Isle of Wight is challenging “The Eggheads”. They should do OK unless they get asked about anything that’s happened after 1959.