Thursday 6 April
It's our 40th wedding anniversary on Sunday. We're spreading the celebrations through the year. They started with the trip to South Africa in February, and we're having a big party in June, when the weather is (hopefully) better. But we thought we ought to do something to mark the date itself, and what we decided to do is to go and stay in a B&B for the weekend, and treat ourselves to an anniversary breakfast on Sunday.
That may seem a bizarre choice of meal for a celebration, but there's a reason for it. Mary finds a large evening meal hard to digest, but she loves a traditional English cooked breakfast. So we're going to stay at a B&B that advertises its excellent breakfasts with an emphasis on locally sourced produce. I hope it's as good as it claims to be. It's in Northumberland, the county that we lived in for seven years in the 1960s and 1970s and where our children were born. The B&B is in the north of the county, near the little town of Wooler, not far from the Scottish border. It's a beautiful part of the country, and it will bring back happy memories of our early days of married life.
On our way home, we'll be stopping off in Newcastle for three days, where I'll be attending the annual British mathematical conference and Mary will be hitting the department stores. We lived in Newcastle when we were first married, and that's another place that will bring back happy memories.
Saturday 15 April "Words are all we have" (Samuel Beckett)
We're home from a very pleasant week in Northumberland, although it didn't go entirely according to plan. The B&B that we had arranged to stay in for the first two nights, near the little town of Wooler, seemed ideal. The owners were very welcoming, and had left a 40th anniversary card and a little gift of chocolates in our room. The breakfast was excellent, including bacon and sausages from Tamworth pigs raised in a nearby rare breeds farm. The trouble was that Mary reacted very strongly to some allergen in the bedroom (we never discovered what it was) and hardly slept all night. The owners offered to let us change room the following night. But they only had two other rooms, one of which had just been painted and the other had the same smell that Mary was reacting to. So we regretfully decided that we had to adopt plan B and move on for the following night. Plan B consisted of staying with our old friends in Corbridge, who run a B&B there. As luck would have it, they had decided not to take any paying visitors that night (they had a full house the previous day), so they had plenty of room for us. We spent the day at the Alnwick Garden before driving to Corbridge, where our friends gave us a good dinner and an allergy-free bedroom.
Then we spent three days in Newcastle, where I was attending a conference. Our Corbridge friends pretended to be shocked that I should be celebrating our anniversary by going to a math conference, but I explained that I was actually being very generous in giving Mary the opportunity for three days' shopping spree in Newcastle (which in fact was exactly how she spent the time).
Apart from our wedding anniversary, there was another significant anniversary last week, which seems to have passed almost unnoticed. Friday was the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett. At my old school, in the London suburb of Dulwich, we had a gallery club, and a group of us would go each month to see one of the latest plays in the West End, queueing up for last minute tickets in the gallery at two shillings or half a crown (ten or twelve and a half pence in today's money). We saw some memorable productions, including the first London runs of My Fair Lady and West Side Story as well as many more serious plays. One play that made a deep impression was Beckett's Waiting for Godot. It encouraged me to read some of Beckett's novels. I'd like to say something profound about them, but the sad fact is that nearly fifty years later I can't remember a single thing about any of them, except for one phrase that stuck in my mind. Describing some character's feeling of sexual disgust, Beckett writes about the "cloaca of clonic depravity". I had to look those words up in the dictionary, and I've never forgotten them, though I have no idea which work the quote comes from.
The Beckett quote that keeps surfacing all over the internet is one that sums up his philosophy of hopeful pessimism quite well:
Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.
Worstward Ho, 1983
Tuesday 18 April Another centenary
Significant anniversaries are coming thick and fast at present. Following hard on the heels of the Beckett centenary that I mentioned in the previous entry there's another major milestone to remember. I don't mean the Queen's 80th birthday later this week. As a confirmed republican I'm only too glad to let her celebrate her birthday quietly with her family, without involving the rest of us. And I'm not referring to the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising. That's not an incident that a Brit can take any pride in remembering.
Exactly 100 years ago today, shortly after five in the morning local time, a huge earthquake followed by devastating fires wrecked the young city of San Francisco. The world was very different in those days – no television to show the world what had happened, no radio even. No planes or helicopters to bring relief supplies, virtually no road transport except for horse-drawn vehicles. The only fast means of communication were the telegraph and the railroad. For that reason, local people took the initiative to coordinate rescue services without waiting for higher authority. Within 90 minutes of the first tremor, the local military commander had posted soldiers in the city centre to prevent looting. By midnight that same day, aid had arrived from Los Angeles. Meanwhile, morse code telegraph messages reached President Teddy Roosevelt in Washington. Medical supplies, rations and rescue personnel were summoned urgently, and that night, less than 24 hours after the earthquake, the longest hospital train ever assembled had left the capital for the long journey across the country.
Makes you think about New Orleans, doesn't it?
Thursday 27 April
During the World Snooker Championships I spend far too much time glued to the television. Now that we have BBC Interactive on cable I can even watch it when it's not being broadcast on the regular channels, which is a dangerous waste of time. But the championships finish next Monday, so I'll only have a few more days of vegetating in front of the box.
In the occasional intervals between snooker matches I have been making progress with renovating the family room, starting with the skirting, which was in quite a bad way. I had to lift the carpet all the way round the sides of the room, and fill and smooth the many cracks and blemishes in the skirting before painting it. We have bought new furniture and curtains, and a few days ago we went to Pratts showrooms in Leeds and found a carpet that we very much liked the look of. But the solitary salesman in the carpets department was busy talking to other customers and we had to leave without speaking to him.
Yesterday I went back there to pick up a sample of the carpet that we liked. There were no other customers in the department but the salesman was again busy, this time talking to someone on the telephone. It wasn't a customer but, as far as I could gather from the conversation, one of their suppliers. He wasn't really talking business, just gossiping. I was sure that he had seen me waiting but he showed no sign of ending the conversation so I went and stood right in front of his desk. After a little while he said over the phone, "Look, I'd better stop, I have a customer waiting." But he didn't stop, he went yacking on for another couple of minutes.
That got things off to a bad start. But what really peeved me was that after quoting a reasonably competitive price for the carpet he said there would be an extra charge for fitting it, and another charge for removing the old carpet. I said that I had never come across this before, and he replied that it was standard practice. I didn't argue, but in the 38 years that we have owned houses I have bought quite a number of carpets and this is the first time I have been asked to pay these extras. I got the impression that he sensed that I wasn't too concerned about the cost, and he thought he would take advantage by making up excuses to bump up the price.
I took the sample piece of carpet home and we were both very pleased with the way it looks. This morning we drove to Morgan's Carpets in Harrogate and ordered the same carpet from them, at a lower price and without the extras being added on. Mr Pratt will have to learn that the customer should come first, and that if he doesn't then he will go elsewhere. I'll take the sample back to him tomorrow and say that we've decided not to buy it. If he asks why, I'm undecided whether or not to tell him the truth. I'll probably say something bland like "We've decided it doesn't suit the room as well as we thought it would." If I was a more confrontational person I might just tell him that I wasn't impressed with his attitude.
