The green, green grass of home.

When was it that the phrase, “Oh, but this country is so green!” lost its ability to make the spiteful rainfall we endure acceptable? It was the smiling observation that I used to make as, brown skinned, I was able to watch the cold precipitation gently settle on the verdant pastures of my native land as I returned from some foray to sunnier shores.

No more!

Each new day of rain seems personally directed towards me in a malicious, sneering, damp gesture of wet contempt. I can no longer endure the seemingly endless grey days of sun denied mediocrity; the featureless skies of vapid indistinctness which makes the sky appear to offer some sort of infinity of nowhereness. “Mother! Give me the sun!” [Note: I am just using the quotation here for what it says on the surface, and I do not want any assumptions to be made about the context; and certainly not the context in which Ibsen placed it!]

I’ve just looked out of the window again and have noted a white sky with a white cloud on it, almost as if the local climate was trying to emulate the wonderful description by Adams of the instrument panel on the stolen space craft taken when leaving the Restaurant at the End of the Universe which had black lights blinking black on a black dashboard! By such metaphors am I able to stand the personally directed campaign of moisture that Wales seems to have in store for me. Thank God for literature!

And the rain falls.

Enough!

Having finished the over-long novel ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ I am looking forward to taking it back to my excellent local library and collecting the next novel in the Dickens series ('Nicholas Nickleby') and losing myself in that loving description of education, not to be surpassed until Gradgrind's establishment is described in ‘Hard Times’. You don’t get a lot of ordinary teachers in literature do you? They are either life changing forces of nature, or evil, conniving child haters. The impossible paragon of pedagogic virtues exemplified in ‘Dead Poets Society’ (never mind the one mere fatality, it wasn’t really his fault, was it?) to the bitter caricature of the teacher in ‘How Green Was My Valley (but that also has a compensatory good one too). Seneca was Nero’s teacher: what does that say about philosopher teachers? Perhaps if Nero had not had such a prestigious tutor he might have been worse? Professor Snape in ‘Harry Potter’ is an ongoing problem: his youthful angst directed towards Harry’s father a cause of continuing problems in adulthood and his ‘ambiguous’ position viz a viz He Who Cannot be Named do not make him a likely candidate to replace Dr Arnold in ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’ as the kindly understanding mentor! And so it goes on. Still searching for the ordinary!

Toni has decided on a process of replacement for the electronic items which were purloined on our arrival in Barcelona. We have spent an enjoyably unjustifiable amount of time browsing through page after page on the internet gazing in wistful adoration at more and more glitzy and technological attempts to prise money out of accounts by producing ever more luscious versions of the clunky mp3 players that we first bought.

As far as I am concerned the ipod is a design classic, and for once I own it – and not some ‘apparently better value clone’ which never fully lives up to expectations. The ipod is such a masterpiece of sleek miniaturisation that any criticism seems pettifogging and the onus would obviously lie on the shoulders of the consumer requiring him to adjust his life style and values to accommodate such a piece of exquisite electrical engineering rather than expect it to fit in with the requirements of a mere carping human. It reminds me of an aged Punch cartoon (aren’t they all) showing a fin de siecle couple gazing at a ‘modern’ teapot in transports of delight and the man asking his partner, “Dare we live up to it?” We have to fit in with Apple’s view of the world and we should be grateful that we are living at such times that Apple can play such a large part in it. I didn’t realise that when I had my first real computer (an apple mac) that I was making a life choice!

I will be interested to see if Apple responds to Microsoft’s incursion into its territory with the elusive Zune by producing its threatened all screen version of the video ipod with the ‘wheel’ as part of the touch screen. Now that would be something!

At the risk of tempting fate: I do feel somewhat better and I feel that my various infectrions and viral attacks are beginning to abate in their unrelenting hostility.

I think that I will be better by Monday; or at least better enough to be fully able to enjoy not going to school!