Over brekkie I was looking at
Facebook and saw endless pictures of children in the most obscure fancy dress.
Today is World
Book Day, and so small children go to school dressed as their favourite
literary character.
Or so it is said.
The truth of the matter is that
bearing in mind that most of the young mothers haven’t read much, they have a
look on Google and/or go up the road to the local fancy dress hire shop and see
what they can find. I saw quite a few children dressed as literary characters
today, but I also saw quite a few TV characters too. Since when have Indiana
Jones and SpongeBob SquarePants been major landmarks in the field of
literature?
Perhaps I’m just old and grumpy,
but why not teach the children to read a book rather than having them dress up
as something out of “Paw Patrol” and have them expecting a Nobel Prize
for literature?
I’ve always been an avid reader
myself; I’ve started a new little project. The very provisional first
draft is on-line here. Eventually I might work on it somewhat. Or I
might forget all about it. Time will tell.
However I must admit that
traditional books are very much “so-last-Tuesday”. When I got to the
point that there simply wasn’t any more room in the house for more books I got
a Kindle and many bibliophiles would say I turned to the dark side. But e-books
are so much easier. You can carry a library round in your pocket. E-books don’t
gather dust and fall apart. And when I dropped my Kindle and poggered the
screen I realised I could read e-books on my phone. I didn’t need to carry
anything extra round with me. And they are cheaper. Is that wrong of me?
As I got dressed Treacle came
and sat with me. I can imagine many people looking at her and thinking how
sweet that was. I wasn’t fooled for a second. She sat looking angelic, and the
moment she thought my attention had wavered she made a bid for my socks.
Being on a late shift I had time
for a walk round the park with the dogs. We had what I might best describe as a
near-miss with a cyclist in which Pogo nearly had him in the river, but it
ended with him apologising to me. The chap was cycling along; Pogo ran past his
bike. There was a swerve and nearly a splash. I decided that the best form of
defence was attack, and when the cyclist had finished ranting I firmly pointed
out that if he wasn’t wearing headphones he would have heard me calling the
dogs. And that if he wasn’t fiddling on his phone he would have seen the dogs,
And that if his hands had been on the handlebars he could have applied the
brakes a bit sooner. And that if he’d been paying attention, he would have seen
that the dogs weren’t actually on his side of the cycle-path.
The chap on the bike conceded
defeat.
We got to the park to see
something I’ve never seen before. The Jehovah’s Witnesses stall at the park
gates was having a religious argument. Up until now they have been rather good;
just leaving people alone and smiling sweetly. But the stall is under new
management and they are somewhat pushy. However this time they had bitten off
more than they could chew. A fellow dog walker was ripping into them about all
sorts of religious things, and all the chap on the stall could say was that the
woman was raising very good questions. I stood and listened for a few minutes
until the dogs got bored; the nice ladies on the stall (the ones with legs
all the way up to their bums) had been fussing the dogs in a shallow
attempt to pretend they weren’t anything to do with the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
As we walked, all three dogs
pooped. Last night we’d tried some new dog toothbrushes; things made of very
hard blue plastic which we filled with dog toothpaste. The dogs chew the
things, and it is like brushing their teeth, only easier (have you ever
tried going at a Patagonian tripe-Hound with a toothbrush?). This morning
all three were pooping out small blue plastic fragments. Those dog toothbrushes
are going in the bin.
Once home I
did some more of my online botany
course, then set off in the general direction of work. I drove down the road to Currys/PC World. Recently I bought a camera
from eBay which turned out to be of absolutely no use to me. So last night I
thought I might try to repair my old one. To cut a long and rather sad story
short, the fragments of that old camera are now in the bin. None of the staff
in Currys/PC World were prepared to give me the time of day, but it didn't look
like they had any cameras anyway.
I drove up to
Snodland. There is a geocache there that hadn't been found in over a year. I found
it right away; I felt rather smug about that.
From there I
drove to the Currys/PC World near work. I was immediately harangued with a
rather supercilious assistant who clearly held me in the same low regard in
which I came to hold him. He had an incredibly thick beard, and was glowering
at me through it in a way not unlike that in which a rat might peer through a
bale of hay. I explained I wanted a camera, and that (for me) the most
important feature was that it would take AA batteries. The assistant thought
this was rather a laughable priority and demanded to know why I would be so
foolish as to want AA batteries. He wittered on for some time about
milliamp-hours and the reliability of power packs. When he had finished his
(obviously pre-prepared and rehearsed) speech, I suggested that when the
power-packs go flat you can't buy them just anywhere, whereas every corner shop
sells AA batteries. It rather obviously boiled his piss that he couldn't argue
with this.
In the end he
suggested I bought a particular camera that they didn't have in stock. I made a
note of exactly what make and model it was, and I shall have a look on Amazon
later.
I got to
work, and once I'd found a parking space I went in to the works canteen and had
a rather good dose of lasagne and chips. Diet - what diet?
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