Back to work after a nice weekend with visiting friend. Ate lots of carbs, drank lots of wine, watched lots of Olympics. Loaned and returned books: we are on a quest to find things that are positive and life-affirming, but it seems my whole collection fails this mission. ‘I see you have lots of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, says she. ‘Er, yes, that would be alcoholism, relationship and mental breakdown laced with the excesses of the Jazz Age’. We’ll keep trying.
Olympics: Nicole wossname thoroughly deserved her gold medal in the cycling road race. Made Headington Hill look like a gentle undulation, then there was the torrential rain… so many reasons why I’m not an elite athlete… Breakfast much improved by two golds in the swimming, even if our boys missed out on the diving. Hey they all looked fab to me. Really quite clever at somersaulting backwards off stupidly high places.
Last night I watched Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s latest language-no-one-actually-speaks, bloodthirsty offering. Was quite good actually. It exposed my woeful sense of history though as I was puzzled to see Europeans turning up in nifty boats at the end. I thought the Mayans and Aztecs and those dudes were like thousands of years BC, back when we were mostly saying ‘ug’. Apparently they were still around in the 16th century. How have I missed this vital information? Could we not have skipped a few terms of spinning jennies and checked this out instead? Also I want my money back from Sid Meier as he always made theese civilisations out to be reasonably peace-loving.
Talking of Ug, I hope you’re familiar with Raymond Briggs’s Ug, boy genius of the stone age and his search for soft trousers. Marvellous. Poor boy castigated for questioning mum and dad about the value of sleeping under rock duvets when there are warm furry dead things lying about… Twas ever thus with progress.
