the new emotional blackmailer's handbook

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

my dear sweet funny aunt mavis, dowager duchess of pontllanfraith, 96 today !

Friday, March 25, 2011

a souvenir

3BT from Venice, and from Padua

At sunset, from the north wall of the Arsenale, there is a clear and unexpected view of pink and distant snowy mountains.

In the museum of antiquities in Padua, the skeletons of a cavalryman buried with his horse two thousand five hundred years ago, the man’s head fossilized now against what was once perhaps the cushion of the horses neck.

In Giotto’s Scrovegni chapel, also in Padua, a sunbeam slants across the panel depicting the Lamentation and catches their haloes.

… and three more

Just before nine in the morning, two minutes walk to the east of the Piazza San Marco, a well dressed young man’s handsome face suddenly takes on a childish smile and he hopscotches along the flagstones … perhaps the primary school we just passed in the last street is his old one.

Following only ten yards behind him, a much taller man sways like a dancer as he balances two heavy polystyrene cases of fish on his head, stabilised there in their onward trajectory with an inch-thick ring of cloth.

Later, I step through the double-glazed door on to our balcony in my best pyjamas. It is mid afternoon. On the opposite bank of the Fondamenta San Lorenzo, the young waitress standing in the doorway of the Trattoria al Greci glances up, her face a question mark. I bend down in to the shadow behind the balustrade and then hold up for her to see the bottle of prosecco I’d left to cool there last night. She smiles and confirms her understanding with a double thumbs-up.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

we'll be away for a few days ... back next weekend

when i rule the universe ... songbirds will be expensively licensed, by imperial decree

Friday, March 18, 2011

why does she keep all this junk ? soon there'll be no room for my piles of old newspapers

Sunday, March 13, 2011

i wonder if it's stuffed with large denomination banknotes she's forgotten to spend ?

Saturday, March 12, 2011

my book of the month ... my backscratcher of the millenium

3BT from Friday the eleventh of March

Driving the truck with practised precision in brilliant spring sunshine so that it glides up and over that switchback road from Nutley towards Duddleswell across the southern fringe of Ashdown Forest whilst Radio 3 blasts out the Lone Ranger theme ( the trick of in-cab stereo is to shift the balance towards the left speaker ) … not quite the full Valkyrian Apocalypse Now experience but certainly elating … faster than the fastest horse, farther than the swiftest arrow ! Now where did I put my white hat and my black mask, and my silver six guns ?

Glancing up from a four in the morning slump with a most enchanting book at exactly the right moment and glimpsing the blurred façade of The Book Trust at Wandsworth slipping past the rainy windows of the night bus towards Peckham … foreground and background out of focus beyond the twin frames of my reading glasses.

http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Home

Admiring other’s minds. For example, my boss, my guvnor. He can’t spell and struggles to write a paragraph but he memorises dialogue and re-enacts film scenes … this afternoon he mimicked Eddie Murphy in Coming To America. I tell him I’m re-visualizing his own scene in my next production … in which Satan brands two words across his forehead in eternally flaming capitals … TOP BASTARD !