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Wednesday, December 17, 2008


Another school has shyly popped its head above the parapet of educational indifference and coquettishly beckoned me to come for an interview.

No job of course. Another one of the ‘just checking out for the future’ sort of occasions. If this carries on I am likely to be one of the most interesting potential employees not employed in the whole of Catalonia!

As with so much else it is yet another case of waiting and seeing. but with my love of gadgets I do need other sources of money to feed my habit other than rapidly dwindling savings held, I am sorry to say, in that discredited currency ‘sterling!’

My response to El Crisis has been to revisit the money laundering restaurant. I am probably doing it a grave disservice and perpetrating a serious calumny on a perfectly reputable eatery but, yet again, I was the sole person sitting in the place having a meal. So I had a manager, a bar person, three waiters and a kitchen staff to myself. How do they make money? How much must they have lost in feeding me?

And what a lunch! A subtle bean, prawn and mussel soup (I know that sounds like a culinary oxymoron, but take it from me you had to be there to taste it work!) This was followed by medallions of beef with a savoury sauce on basmati rice, culminating in a home made Tiramisu that would have had Paul One weeping into his café solo! And a glass of red wine for round about a tenner. O tempera O mores!

The e-book continues to please as I relentlessly add more and more books to its ever accommodating SD card enhanced memory. Given the grotesquely high pricing of commercial e-books I have no desire to purchase any.

Reading the comments on any site concerned with e-books it is obvious that there is a surge of what appears to me to be quite justified rage about publishers not passing on the obvious savings that they make by not having to produce a physical book and therefore have no shipping, storage and expensive commercial outlet expenses. In some cases the electronic e-book is actually MORE expensive than its paper equivalent. It seems as though the previous experience of the film and music industries in product pricing is something that publishers think they can ignore. Who was it who said that the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history!

Luckily for me there is a whole life time of ‘out of copyright’ reading that is electronically available free, gratis and for nothing on a multitude of sites. All those books that one had to pretend that one had read in university will now come back and form an orderly line, their little electronic impulses waiting their turn to tickle my neurons. Just think of all those brick-like novels from the nineteenth century which form the impossible walls of reading than even a dedicated bibliophile will find impossible, let alone a university student!

Some libraries have whole shelves of Ruskin in elegant closely printed and sometimes illustrated volumes of his collected works (perhaps I still have some in the anonymous boxes in storage.) How many books did Thackeray publish - most of which I haven’t read. I could always revisit pre-Shakespearean drama.

No, pre-Shakespearean drama is one genre too far – but merely concentrating on the copyright free parts of the twentieth century will afford fascinating acres of forest saved if I read the books in electronic form.

And for nothing!

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