Meanwhile...

Here's Charles Pooter of Diary Of A Nobody fame - a bit of a hero and role model of mine - enjoying Bonfire Night:
'In the evening we went round to the Cummings' to have a few fireworks. It began to rain, and I thought it rather dull. One of my squibs would not go off, and Gowing said: 'Hit it on your boot, boy; it will go off then.' I gave it a few knocks with the end of my boot, and it went off with one loud explosion, and burnt my fingers rather badly. I gave the rest of the squibs to the little Cummings boy to let off.'
And I've just discovered that there's an online version of the Diary.

History

A historic day then - the day when, in 1605, Guido Fawkes and his gang of prototerrorists were thwarted in their attempt to blow up Parliament. This used to be a big deal in England, with every household making some attempt at a firework display on the night, while boys had the pleasure of lobbing bangers and jumping jacks around at will. Those days are gone now - when did you last see a 'Penny for the Guy'? Except among the pope-and-pikey-burning villages of the Lewes area, Bonfire Night is a sanitised, municipalised affair, a pyrotechnic display conveniently held on the nearest Saturday. The November 5 tradition seems to have been edged out of the popular calendar by Halloween, that interloper from America.
Ah yes, America. That election thing... Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be middle-aged and cynical was very... No no, enough of that - it was the right result, the inevitable result (though the Dem stranglehold on Senate and Congress is worrying). McCain was totally outcampaigned and looked old and confused (if only he'd beaten W to the nomination in 2000...). Indeed the McCain campaign peaked with his fine concession speech - which is not quite how it's supposed to go. Heaven knows what kind of president Obama will make - I just hope he doesn't turn out to be, beneath the glamour and the eloquence, Jimmy Carter mark 2. I hope he gets off to a better start than Bill Clinton did. And I hope above all that the psychos of Al Qaeda don't decide to test his mettle early on with one of their trademark atrocities. For now, let's look on the bright side,and rejoce that America has yet again proved that, in the final analysis, it's a resoundingly Good Thing.

Almost Hair-Raising

An interesting find from the jungles of Patagonia, which seems to suggest a major rethink of hydrocarbons is overdue. What I particularly like is the quote from the scientist, who noted that 'almost every hair' on his arms stood up (no doubt like quills upon the fretful porpentine). He must have been counting...

88:88

Apologies for not blogging yesterday. I was in one of those sorry states of mind/body when the only realistic option was mindless physical labour to the accompaniment of Radio 4, so I spent much of the day cleaning the kitchen. I hope this sorry state wasn't related to the catastrophe that befell on Friday night, when I arrived home expecting to slump in front of Neil Young Night on BBC4, and found that my digital cable box had comprehensively packed up, displaying the straight eights - 88:88 - that identify a box as bound for the digibox graveyard. It could not be fixed until today - which is why last night, with only the wasteland of terrestrial TV to scour, I ended up watching Prescott: The Class System and Me on BBC2.
This two-parter was made in the over-familiar 'journey' format - Nick Cohen nails it brilliantly here - but with the novel difference that Prezza's 'journey' was entirely circular, as he had already made up his mind about the class system, and nothing anyone said to him about it was going to make any difference. Time after time, the people of all classes that his researchers had lined up for him to talk to blew all his class-war assumptions out of the water - but would Prezza take any notice of that? Of course not. He knew the 'British class system' had held him back - otherwise how could a man of his astounding abilities rise no higher than deputy prime minister? - and that was that, at the end as at the beginning. In the course of this 'journey', the Prescott shoulder only accumulated more chips. The sole interesting or attractive thing about this waste of airtime was Pauline Prescott. The mystery of how she puts up with her appalling husband must still be exercising all who saw this series.
Still, the BBC can come good sometimes, even on terrestrial TV. Laurence Rees's latest, WWII: Behind Closed Doors, which is coming soon, is a superb account of Stalin's making and breaking of alliances in the course of the war. And of course there's always Radio 4, which for all its annoying ways, is still something of a national treasure - especially when it has the gloriously sour Ed Reardon's Week (a comedy that cuts across the grain of the BBC and all it stands for - it's a miracle it was ever commissioned). With Ed Reardon for company, cleaning the kitchen was a postive pleasure. Therapeutic too.

Herons - Not What They Used to Be...

After yesterday's relentless rain, a morning of pale pearly sunlight, diffused through thin cloud. As I crossed the park, this light was showing the still rain-wet autumn trees to glorious effect; the willows in particular, leaves shimmering, seemed barely substantial. Nearer at hand, the fiery reds of cherry and maple, set off by dark masses of yew... By the river a man was throwing bread to the ducks - and to the resident heron, who was eagerly fighting off the competition, grabbing chunks of bread and knocking them back with a fling of the head. This is something I never thought, in my younger days, I'd see. Then a heron was a notable sight - a strange lanky outsize thing in the middle distance, unpacking an improbable quantity of wing and flapping heavily away. I remember I once found, bizarrely, a heron's skull, picked quite clean, by a river bank. I kept it for some while, even did a drawing of it, which I think I still have somewhere...
The heron then was strictly a country sight - though this was not always so. Herons are still a presence in W.H. Hudson's Birds of London, and he recalls the great herneries that lasted into the closing years of the 19th century, despite the best efforts of chaps with guns. But in the following century, with the Thames polluted and the wild wet places disappearing, herons, along with cormorants and kingfishers, left town, returning decades later to a cleaner river with plentiful fish. The next stage of the great reconquest came about with the spread of the Eighties fad for 'water features' (remember Charlie Dimmock?) and garden ponds, offering rich pickings for an early-rising heron. Now this spectacular bird is a commonplace sight of suburban London - and has so far lost its dignity as to take bread as if it were a municipal duck. I shouldn't really be surprised - this particular heron, which haunts the ponds as well as the river, has always seemed pretty useless at fishing, spending most of its time slouching around to no useful effect, and fixing humans, even at very close range, with a beady and fearless eye. It seems it has got our measure - we're there to provide the food. Though I wonder if herons can thrive on bread alone...

Supremely Funny

I know I shouldn't, but The Onion's on such sensational form at the moment, and this one brought tears of laughter to my eyes - no mean feat on a grey Saturday morning. And the election coverage is just brilliant...

At Last - It's Here! A Caption Contest

As it's the weekend and nothing much is happening that isn't too depressing to contemplate, here's something to get your wits limbered...