Double Dippy Doldrums

Can anybody here tell dippy old me if the second dip in a double-dip recession is likely to be better or worse than the first dip?

I met up with my old mates Frank, Max, Joe and Charlie yesterday. Like me, they’d flown back to the UK from their winter homes abroad to catch up with family and friends. Of course, a major topic of conversation was the financial crisis. And each of us had a horror story to tell about the way in which the recession had affected our lives.

Frank told us he’d had a terrible time so far. He’d piled into the Stock Market when the FTSE plunged below 4000, and then sold out after it soared well above 5000. Gosh how I feel for him, because the poor chap doesn’t own a single share in anything now.

And Max had a hard time too, when the government gave him and his girlfriend £2000 each to swop their old bangers for brand new cars that cost far less to run. How sad; the poor souls really loved their old cars.

Joe told us how he’d been forced to stock up on lots of goodies when the VAT rate was reduced to 15%. Then Joe broke the sad news about his son, who had bought his first home after the threshold for stamp duty was raised, and after the purchase price fell to a level where the tax was not payable.

And let’s not forget Charlie, whose fixed rate mortgage of 5.09% on his London second home expired and reverted to a standard variable rate of 2.5%. Shocking, isn’t it?

I’m down in the dumps too. Last December I exchanged 10,000 Euros for Pounds Sterling, after which I waited until June when I exchanged the Pounds back into Euros. And would you believe it, in that period of time the Euro per Pound rate changed from 1.09 to 1.21.

Alas, there’s nothing I can do about it, so tomorrow I’m leaving the UK and heading back to the Canary Islands – with my 11,100 Euros of spending money.

I wonder if the second dip of this double-dippy recession will be just as dippy as the first dip for dippy old folk like me and my mates…

:-)

My Big Bang

For some people, the Big Bang is a theory about the beginning of the universe. For other people, it's all about 27th October 1986, when the London Stock Exchange changed its rules and embraced the electronic age. But for me, my Big Bang was a quite different event; one that changed my life forever.

I’d just finished my first year at University, and what a hard year that had been. My step-father had committed suicide because of mounting gambling debts, leaving my Mum as our main breadwinner. Her stepmother had become unwell and had come to live with us. And I’d been working evenings and weekends as a factory delivery driver to help put food on our table.

So I was astonished when Freddie, an extremely wealthy fellow student, asked me if I’d be his co-driver on a journey to Madrid. The deal was that we’d share the driving in his car, he’d pay all expenses, after which we’d part company. He was planning to spend the summer with his fiancée, who lived in Madrid. I’d be left to make my own way home.

Well, the prospect of a free ride to Madrid was irresistible, especially as Freddie wanted us to start the journey when the factory that I worked for was closing down for a fortnight. I reckoned I could hitchhike my way back home easily enough. So I accepted.

The drive was fun. And so was Freddie. Yes, he’d been born with a dozen silver spoons in his mouth; he was rich, intelligent, good-looking, debonair, multilingual, and a brilliant raconteur. He certainly kept me amused on that drive. I guess it was all the laughter that made us miss a turning somewhere outside of Pamplona, and we got hopelessly lost in miles of winding tracks, with not a building in sight.

It was quite late in the evening when we spotted a grand-looking Hacienda high up on a hill. Freddie was driving at the time, and made a beeline for it. I stayed in the car whilst Freddie knocked at the door to ask for directions. After ten minutes or so of conversation with a lady who opened the door, he returned to the car with the good news that we were invited to stay the night.

Freddie explained that the lady had recently been widowed, and could not allow us to stay in the main house. But she had given him a set of keys for a nearby caballeriza – an empty stable block with extremely comfortable overhead staff sleeping quarters, and a hot and cold water supply. That’s where we stayed the night, before continuing our journey to Madrid the following morning.

It must have been around nine months later when I received the letter. It was written in Spanish, from an Attorney in Navarra. I got the general gist of the letter with the help of a Spanish-English dictionary, but just to make sure, I had it professionally translated. It took me a couple of days of quiet reflection to work out what had happened.

I met Freddie at College shortly afterwards, and asked him if he remembered the young widow at the Hacienda. And I asked him if he’d popped back to the Hacienda during the night to thank her for her hospitality. He grinned, and confessed he had.

But what really amazed him was when I asked if he had given her my name and address, instead of his. He turned bright red with embarrassment, and said “How on earth do you know that?”

All I could do was smile.

You see, the letter had informed me that a certain widow in Spain, the Condesa Maria Echeverria Corriente Delgado, had died. And she had left me her considerable fortune in her will.
:-)

Midsummer's Night Madness

.

I’ve just rediscovered an old script for Midsummer’s Night Dream in my bookcase. Yes, I’ve done a bit of acting in my time, but what a disaster that production was.

I played the part of Lysander, and I remember being onstage with Demetrius, Hermia and Helena when I completely screwed things up by repeating a line that I had previously delivered in the earlier part of our conversation.

The conversational sequence was Lys: Dem: Herm: Helena: - at which point I repeated my earlier line Lys.

The funny thing was that none of us noticed my mistake. The other three actors had all learned their lines by rote, and so Demetrius responded to my cue by repeating his earlier line, and then Hermia responded on that cue, as did Helena, after which I repeated my mistake. We were trapped in a closed conversational loop, in which everybody repeated their earlier lines.

It took us about five minutes of repeating ourselves before it gradually dawned on us that our conversation was going nowhere. I still shudder now when I remember the growing sense of bewilderment, confusion, and sheer panic that beset us. We were caught in a conversational time-warp, and none of us could figure out who was to blame (me) or how to break out of our predicament.

I think it took another 5 minutes of us repeating ourselves, and our audience dissolving into laughter, before our director had the good sense to temporarily lower the curtain.

At which point the audience started to cheer – and demand an encore….

:-)

Sperm

Nowadays my mind wanders ever more capriciously. Yesterday it happened again, whilst looking up the definition of a Spenserian Stanza in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

It was while pondering this definition that my eye fell upon the run of subsequent entries in my beloved dictionary. The entry for Spenserian is followed by an entry for Spent, and then, by happy happenchance, with another entry for Sperm.















So it followed that at one moment I was thinking about Spenser’s stanza in the Faerie Queene, with eight iambic pentameters and an alexandrine, and in the very next moment my mind was absorbed in Sperm.

Did you know that the word Sperm is either singular or plural? Or that sperm contains spermatozoa, which is the plural of spermatozoon? And that a spermatozoon begins its life as a spermatogonium, after which it develops into a spermatocyte before becoming the mature motile sex cell that looks and moves like a tadpole?

Gadzooks, I thought! All this extraneous information! My mind was swimming. I imagined myself as a spermatozoon, swimming like a tadpole. Suddenly, I rediscovered my erstwhile interest in genealogy, and I realised I had missed a trick. We are all descended from tadpoles, aren’t we?

But not any old ordinary tadpoles, mind you, but winning tadpoles, by which I mean those precious few; those who create the world’s population; those who succeed where countless zillions of others fail.

We should therefore be far more proud of our immediate ancestor – that special tadpole - than all the ancestors that we normally think of. And I think that the humble yet winning spermatozoon (?) should really be given a name of its own, and be known as the spermato-ZOOM.

Credit where credit is due, that is what I say.

Three cheers for the spermato-ZOOM!
Yippee!
Yippee!!
Yippee!!!
:-)

PS
Yesterday, my girlfriend’s youngest daughter announced her first pregnancy. We were the first to know, and I am due to become an honorary granddad again. And in seven months time, I hope to rediscover the extraordinary delight of cradling a new-born baby in my arms again. We'll have to travel back 2,000 miles from our winter retreat to do that, but I’ll probably be browsing my dictionary en route...

PPS
Here’s the opening verse from the Faerie Queene:

LO I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,
Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,
And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds;
Whose prayses hauing slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds
To blazon broad emongst her learned throng:
Fierce warres and faithfull loues shall moralize my song.

Argint Cell fur Hilp!

Hilp!!! :-(

Es yua cen sii, O’m hevong truabli typong un my cumpatir. O thonk O mey hevi pat sumi uf my elphebitoc kiys beck oncurrictly eftir O tuuk thim uat tu govi thim e clien. My kiys eri rielly shony, bat ivirythong O typi os luukong solly.

Pliesi hilp – end bi sarprosid - loki O em.

Thenks! :-)

I

I know I use the word I a lot when I write. I think I do it because I is such a simple character, and so am I. As a child I found I could write the character I well before I could write any of the others in the alphabet. And I found I could write the sloping I easier than the upright I.

Gosh, I used the word four times in each of the four sentences above, and I think I avoided using inverted commas by using I and I, so this sentence has five.

I think I like I and I even better than I like I, which is six.

Do you have a favourite word or character ?

The Crack of Dawn

All this adventuring I do is very tiring, especially when it gets me out of bed at ungodly hours. You see, I’m an inveterate sleepwalker, and lots of my adventures happen at night.

The other night I happened to wake up with my head sticking out of the bedroom window. I haven’t the faintest idea why my head was sticking out of the window, because my short-term memory switches off as soon as I awake. But I was greeted by a wondrous sight.

It was daybreak, and my head was turned facing the rising sun. As it rose, the sun passed behind the peak of a small mountain and then came into view again on the other side. I’d never noticed this “double dawn” phenomenon before, but then I’d never had my head trapped under a fallen sash window before.

Anyway, as soon as I managed to extricate myself, it occurred to me that I’d never actually witnessed the absolute crack of dawn. I realised that my bedroom window might be the ideal vantage point, provided I was awake a little earlier the next morning with my head turned in exactly the same position as before.

Well, I spent an exciting day making preparations for the crack of dawn. There were lots of logistics to sort out, including thinking up a plan that would ensure my presence at the window at exactly the right time in the morning. The key issue was to ensure I would not be somewhere else - sleepwalking.

I came up with an ingenious idea. I wound up my alarm clock, set it to the right time, and strapped it to my wrist. Then I got a pencil and paper and listed all the places where I had previously woken up after a bout of sleepwalking. I got a local map, and carefully drew a circle around each of these places. This enabled me to identify the location that was furthest from my home, which happened to be the police station. Remarkably, and for reasons that are beyond me, I seem to wake up there quite frequently.

So off I went, to the police station, where I took a careful note of the time on my alarm clock, and then walked back home. On my return to my bedroom, I again noted the time on my alarm clock. I then set the alarm to ring at sunrise minus the elapsed time taken by my walk.

I reasoned that this would ensure my arrival back at my window in good time for the crack of dawn the following morning. I had even taken the precaution of wearing dark sunglasses on my trial walk back from the police station, to simulate the real night-time conditions that I was likely to encounter.

Well, to cut a long story short, the plan, which had left nothing to chance, worked brilliantly well. I can proudly say I was there. I actually witnessed the crack of dawn. And there were two cracks, not one.

I had propped up the sash window to prevent any further accident, and was knelt down in position at the very moment when the sun appeared. And as it appeared, I rose up in excitement, and heard the two cracks of dawn.

And would you believe it? One crack came from my left knee, and the other from my right. But my girlfriend, who always begs to differ, insists it was my head cracking against the bottom of the open sash window that woke her up.

Ho-hum. It is difficult for me to reason with her, because she says I was comatose at that precise instant in time.
:-)