Journal Entries
haiku for the people...
Posted Apr 10, 2000
no.1 in an occasional series...
A steady hum in the old park
The damp, cool dusk -
First lawnmower of the year...
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Latest reply: Apr 10, 2000
a life less laboursome ....
Posted Mar 26, 2000
London has been full of the joys of spring lately. The gentle breath of (nearly) fresh air; the occasional, timid bursts of lukewarm rain; that damp misty early morning sunlight that gives you the feeling that it's almost good, for a change, to be a stranger ....
I sit here in my small but reasonably comfortable ground floor north London flat, having recently enjoyed a pleasant meal - something Italian, if I remember - chewing over the weekend despatches and wondering if I'll ever get the chance to meet Ken Livingstone, just so that I can tell him that even if he wins the Mayoralty, which I suppose he probably will do in the end, the fact remains that, when all said and done, it's still a hollow triumph for We the People, if I can use such a term in this day and age - the man's a *politician*, for goodness sake ....
Various props include :- large mug of delectable French-style after-dinner coffee; small glass of single malt Irish whiskey; a cafe creme cigar (made in Holland, just to complete the non-insuler Euro-sympathetic picture); various resources on the 1960s American killer(?) Lee Harvey Oswald, including the enormous Mailer biography, for a possible Guide entry that I've been working on over the weekend; nearly obsolete Pentium 166 PC tuned in to a chaotic miscellany of Notepads and also, of course, to h2g2 ....
The sparrows chirrup somewhere in the landlady's back garden, the pigeons coo at one another from their sentinel posts just above my open window, the dusk begins to settle .... all else is silence and stillness apart from faint wisps of cigar smoke and the clak-clak of fingers hitting keys, mainly the wrong ones, unfortunately, on my computer keyboard. Two busy carriageways pass by on either side of this small street, meeting at a busy, complicated junction about 1/3 mile north of here, but I can't hear a thing at the moment, not even a faint murmur of traffic. I sometimes find it difficult to believe that I'm living 2 or 3 miles from the centre of one of the largest, busiest, most heavily polluted cities in the (so-called) civilised world. Sometimes it feels like a country home out here ....
Life has a habit of manifesting itself, against the odds, even in the darkest of corners, the most miserable of hellholes. Just ask any Crystal Palace supporter ....
Poor I may well be - by Western standards, at any rate - but I'm decent enough, in my detached, unobtrusive way. And this is one version of the good life ....
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Latest reply: Mar 26, 2000
criticism of the journal layout
Posted Mar 19, 2000
I hate the way the journal scrolls down the page like this. It looks dreadfully messy, even after a couple of short entries. Can there not be a facility for collapsing the entries into subject headings, simply for the sake of neatness. Where do we go to complain about such things? Is there anybody out there at all? ....
Discuss this Journal entry [2]
Latest reply: Mar 19, 2000
first impressions of the Guide ....
Posted Mar 18, 2000
I vaguely remember reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy about ten years ago, when I was a miserable teenager, and as far as I can recall it brightened up a few dull moments along the dreary path towards young adulthood, so naturally I'm grateful for that. I was interested when I accidentally stumbled upon this h2g2 thing a few weeks ago. I like the general idea and the way it's been set-up, especially the nice democratic notion of having, in effect, two guides - one for everyone, and then a more selective version that, however, anyone can take part in if they write something of sufficient quality.
I must say, on the slightly less than upside, after visiting a general selection of Guide entries, I feel slightly concerned about the nearly 'god-like' presence that Adams himself seems to have acquired - rather to his own embarrassment, I would have thought, as much as anything else - over the project as a whole. I soon became rather tired of the endless twee references to towels, fish, pan-galactic gargle blasters and other such HGTHG arcana, feeling that this is something that the project as a whole will obviously need to overcome if it is to develop and survive as an entity it its own right.
Then again, I don't see any reason to be pessimistic about this - the site as a whole seems to have a certain quirky identity that I haven't personally found anywhere else on the Web ....
Discuss this Journal entry [25]
Latest reply: Mar 18, 2000
on not leading an interesting life
Posted Mar 17, 2000
Personally, I don't really lead an interesting life at all. I would say the best kind of life is an uneventful one. So this space won't be changing very much ....
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Latest reply: Mar 17, 2000
Lear (the Unready)
Researcher U114471
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