by I’ve just had a phone call. It was a woman from the mattress company. She spoke so damn fast at the beginning that I almost blacked out. After all this time, Romanian on the phone can still be a real challenge for me.
Right now I’m living in a near-permanent state of fatigue. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the stress related to the move, the regular bike rides, or some combination. I don’t feel refreshed even after a full night’s sleep. Maybe I really need this new mattress.
I had a chat with my brother on Sunday. They still had the bunting out for the jubilee. It’s obvious that he’s had enough of life in the army. All the early starts and pointless trips are getting to him. Amazingly he’s started a correspondence university course in – I think – business management. He says he’ll finish it in 18 months. My sister-in-law, who is expanding, was more upbeat. Mum keeps referring to her future grandson as Herbie, which was the name of a guinea pig we used to have. (We don’t even know what it’ll be yet. It’s still an it.)
After being booed at the jubilee, Boris Johnson survived his confidence vote last night, but a whopping 41% of his Tory colleagues voted against him. His supporters – a bunch of overgrown schoolboys – banged their desks in unison on learning the result. A good result for the country, Boris said. In the medium and long term, I hope he’s right. A divided party with a lame-duck leader that staggers on to the next election, then gets well and truly stuffed. The UK ends up with a coalition of Labour, the Lib Dems, and the SNP. They introduce proportional representation. That would be good for the country.
Shortly before the jubilee celebrations, the British government announced that pounds and ounces and other imperial measurements could be making a comeback, not that they’ve totally gone away. I’ve always quite liked imperial measurements because they’re batshit mad and much more fun to say than the metric versions. I recently got one of my students to read a simplified version of Alice in Wonderland in which Alice’s heights had been converted into metres and centimetres, and it felt like we’d been transported to a lab. I still remember Dad (“you can’t even see those silly millimetres”) ordering sheets of glass for his paintings in inches, one by one, over the phone. “Twenty-four and five-eighths by seventeen and three-quarters.” The person on the other end would repeat the dimensions back to him, and the whole thing took on a poetic quality, a bit like the BBC shipping forecast. But, after being taught in metric and living all those years in New Zealand, and now Romania where non-metric is almost unheard of, it’s obvious that metric is far superior for doing actual calculations and when you’ve got to, you know, do business internationally. Going back to imperial would quite clearly be crazy.
The shipping forecast, read four times a day on Radio 4, has a place in British culture. It follows a strict format that hasn’t changed in decades, running through the evocative names of the shipping areas – 31 in all – always going round the British Isles clockwise in the same order: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and so on. I liked listening to it as a kid, and I still remember the warnings of “hurricane force 12” in the storm of October 1987. It’s still popular today, even if it’s far less in demand, thanks to the internet. It reminds you that you’re part of something far bigger, that there are people out there exposed to the high seas, not in air-conditioned offices. Regular listeners get to know the announcers. I tuned in over the weekend and listened to a forecast read by Neil Nunes, who has quite a wonderful deep voice. He comes from Jamaica and started at the BBC in 2006. Apparently some rather bigoted listeners complained at the time that his voice wasn’t British enough. The late-night forecast is preceded by Sailing By, a beautiful song. (YouTube comments are nearly always awful, but the ones for Sailing By are delightful.) Other maritime countries, like New Zealand, have shipping forecasts too, but they don’t have the cultural signficance of the British one. The shipping areas are rattled off in a great 1994 song by Blur called This is a Low. Damon Albarn, whom I’ve seen live, likes referencing the sea in his songs.
After Saturday’s washout, I played tennis on Sunday. It was a hot one, and I was relieved to be playing doubles and not singles. They had some kind of party on the beach volleyball courts next door, with music that I found almost unbearable. I partnered a 14-year-old girl against two men, and we played a heck of a set lasting roughly an hour. Following numerous deuce games, we got to 6-6 but then fell 6-1 behind in the tie-break. We saved four set points but my error on the fifth was the last shot of the set. We had to call it a day at 2-2 in the second set. After that we picked sour cherries from the laden tree next to the courts. It’s a great time for fruit right now.
As promised last time, here are some pictures.
