Bloody Electrics

You can't sleep through a power cut in this house because the stair lift starts bleeping to let you know it's working on its battery. Then, of course, when the power comes on again you have thirty seconds to get downstairs and punch in the code before the alarm goes off.

We had three power cuts last night.

Random Snippet Of Information

Tennyson had a dog called Karenina- which can only mean that he'd read Tolstoy. How odd to think of those two very different writers existing in the same universe.

Stranger On The Shore

Serious jazzers tend to be sniffy about Acker Bilk, but all it takes to achieve immortality is to write one great tune.

I watched the TV serial that gave the tune its name. It was about a French au pair. I was just a kid and I didn't really get what was going on but I remember it as one of the first adult fictions to take me by the throat. The girl was so lonely, poor thing.  I can picture the opening and closing credits:  a single figure wandering along a shingly beach- in black and white of course- with Acker Bilk's clarinet noodling away...