Sunday Bloody Sunday

I didn't benefit much from the extra hour in bed provided by the clocks going back. I had a disturbed night. I think that I have started to snore and that this keeps waking me up. As I am going to sleep I am roused awake again by a sound not dissimilar to what my father, in yesterday's post, called the maritime chorus of ships' hooters on the Mersey. I am then kept awake by reflections on the horror of becoming a snorer and whether this is one of the harbingers of old age. Can it be long before I sit snoring in front of the television on Christmas Day and then insist to my young relatives that I wasn't really asleep, just 'resting my eyes'?

Waking early, I decided to catch up on yesterday's newspaper.
The Guardian's food writer Matthew Fort had decided to go back to basics with recipes for scrambled eggs and cheese on toast. However, he asserts that to make really good scrambled eggs they need to be cooked for 40 minutes on a hob no hotter than a single candle. And, of course, they need to be stirred throughout. That's right: 40 minutes. I'm sorry, but the only phrase that can be used in this context is 'taking the piss.'

I turned to the Review section and found an interview with someone I'd actually heard of: the playwright Simon Gray. But throughout the article his first stage play is referred to as 'Wild Child'. It is actually called 'Wise Child.' I became disproportionately angry about this mistake. I couldn't have been angrier if I'd written the play myself. Don't these journalists ever check things or proof-read? Wouldn't you familiarise yourself with the titles of all his plays before even doing the interview?

It seems a revival of his 'Otherwise Engaged' is soon to open in London and it so happens that my father got the title of that play wrong when he and my mother went to see it.
"What's this play called?" he asked as they were travelling to the theatre.
"Otherwise Engaged", said my mother.
My father, who is very deaf, thought she said "Other Guys and Gays".
Since he never hears all of the dialogue in a theatre and has to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw himself, he saw a completely different play from the one that Simon Gray had written and was just relieved that none of the male characters had simulated sex on stage.

I then spent a chunk of the morning adjusting all the clocks in Lupin Towers. This takes only a few seconds with old analogue clocks where you just twiddle the knob on the back. But with digital clocks you lose that hour you gained in the process of re-setting them all. Sometimes you have to hunt for the user manual because if you try and do it by guesswork you can wipe all your preset radio and television stations. And why do these digital clocks need to know the date, month and year? When have you ever consulted a clock to find out what bloody year it is? Or even the day of the week?

It's been pissing down with rain all day and now it's getting dark at four o'clock. All it needs now is for some little bastard to come trick or treating at my front door.
Such a disagreeable day, in fact, that I might as well spend the evening stirring scrambled eggs over the flame of my cigarette lighter.
No, on second thoughts it would probably run out of gas, I wouldn't be able to light a cigarette and then the trick or treating brats would get the kind of verbal that would see me hauled up before the local magistrates.