New Year Round-up

[poliphilo]

We've been drinking Flemish beer out of Flemish beer glasses over the holiday. The glasses- they're more like goblets actually- came from a Belgian junkshop and are probably forty years old; the beer came from Sainsburys.

I watched a lot of telly last night. Firstly Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls- which wasn't very good, then a bit of a Morecambe and Wise Christmas special- which was embarrassingly bad and lastly an episode of the Swedish Wallander- which was very like the English Wallander except that Wallander was a big, clumsy bear of a man with floppy hair and there were fewer lovely landscapes- presumably because the Swedes already know what their country looks like.

We had a couple of beers for lunch. We don't drink much. We started off the season with 18 bottles and there are still 5 left. I  went to throw the empties in the bin and Samina was out front valeting her car. We got into conversation. Her New Year has been taken up with burying a cousin who died of swine flu. "That's how it goes," she says, "when you have a family as large as mine."

Comments

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

What a philosophical approach to tragedy! Seems like swine flu is just as pernicious as it was last year, but without the press hysteria, we're all bumbling around like a bunch of Eloi pretending the Morlocks don't actually exist.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Samina has lost two children of her own- both born with some sort of inherited defect. She has every excuse to retreat into herself and be miserable- but she soldiers on, works very hard at her job and raising her two surviving children- and always seems cheerful. I admire her enormously.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I have tremendous admiration for people like that...