Forelock Tugging!

Listening to Miranda by Tappi Tikarrass

We took advantage of the National Garden Scheme yesterday and visited Crosby Hall. I have driven along the garden walls many times but have never been inside though it is often open for various events and indeed is the location for Crosby Hall Educational Trust which lets local kids see various rural things. It might have been more atmospheric if there had not been several hundred other people there but you can’t really expect to get personal invitations to these sort of places. The children were very much interested in the Peacocks but they seemed very wary and can you blame them. The gardens are divided up with many out-buildings and high-brick walls which gives it a rather intimate feel. The close-cropped lawns around the main house, give way to pasture from which they are separated by a ha-ha. All very civilized. Nationalise it now! That of course is a joke when you remember the civic-minded attitude of the owners. I think Orwell would have liked it.

Talking of Eric Arthur reminds me of the Senior Policeman who worries about the number of cameras about. The reporter on the news yesterday said he had counted 20 cameras within a few yards of Orwell’s blue-plaque in London which must have resulted in surely spectacular post-mortem rotation in the old plain speaker. I did not realise that CCTV images are covered under the data-protection act and you can request images of yourself for a SMALL FEE. It seems that a lot of the agencies holding these images either do not know the rules or do not want you to know the rules. I wonder if Mark Thomas has been informed? He could possibly organise a mass of individual requests of footage. If enough people did it then it would not be worthwhile carrying on. There is no difference between the replacement of Beat Policemen with Cameras and the substitution of ATMs for bank tellers – It’s all about money rather than “to improve the service to you - the customer”. Someone has just made a movie entirely from bits of CCTV footage of herself.

Anyway, big news is that I have finished Cloud Atlas having been drawn into it by a structure far more complicated than a sneering reviewer on Amazon would admit. The prose in each section never seemed contrived to me and yet every so often a corresponding event in one section would be recalled by one in another though one might evoke horror and another just amusement. It is a much more sophisticated example of an idea I had myself though of course the idea has surfaced in someone’s head many times over the course of history. In fact I think there is a paragraph stating exactly that in one of the sections. All in all a very satisfying book despite the shaky false start on my part. I actually felt a bit lost last night and floundered around trying to find something which I considered able to compete with CA. I have resorted to the palate-cleanser of Rendezvous with Rama which I haven’t read for at least 15 years.