pumpkinstrokemarrow

Greenpeace continue to mount demonstrations which may or may not be legal but which as far as I am concerned go well beyond what is reasonable. This latest one was said by the Guardian to have shut down lots of Shell petrol stations in London and Edinburgh and involved interfering with the emergency shut off switches. In a world where crime, riot and terrorism lurk not too far beneath the surface outfits, like Greenpeace would do well to rein themselves in a bit and set a better example. Stop giving the various security industries yet another excuse to get even more pervasive and intrusive than they already are. In the meantime I shall continue to try to make sure that none of my money winds up in their coffers.

What one might think about drilling for polar bears in the Arctic is beside the point. But the man from Shell was a model of self restraint: '... we respect the right of individuals and organisations to engage in a free and frank exchange of views ...'.

Further irritation caused by trying to get into the spirit of things and see a bit of Olympic Torch - although I am pleased to say no-one is yet suggesting that I should actually go and see any Olympics, paraplegic or otherwise. So I get onto what I presume is the official Olympic web site and ask it all about the doings of the torch in and about Garratt Lane and what do I get but a rather badly presented bit of map. After much huffing and puffing and some help from Mr. Google, I eventually discover that the place to find out about the torch is not the Olympic web site at all but the BBC web site, which explains in great detail the progress of the torch down Garratt Lane. It seems that it will end up in the car park of Tooting Bec Lido where Samsung will be laying on some entertainment.

It certainly used to be a very fine lido with plenty of spectator sport on offer on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Maybe just the place for womens' bantam weight water polo. Maybe Samsung are sponsors of same?

Then settled down to last week's TLS and ground to a halt in the middle of some Lit. Crit. thing about George Eliot. All terribly heavy going and one starts to wonder why we are buying feed for these people. If they want to do this stuff in their own time, fine, but I am not sure that I want to be paying them to do it. But then I am not sure what I want English Departments in universities to be doing at all: they should exist, they should be doing something and I am very doubtful if scoring them according to the number of papers they publish is the way forward, but that is about as far as I get.

But the good news is that I skimmed a piece about a chap called Gissing, very popular in his day, said by Orwell to be a fine novelist and said by Wikipedia to have had an interesting early life. So off to Gutenburg to pull down three of the novels with special mentions in Wikipedia and I am now stuck in to 'Odd Women' on the kindle. Sufficiently interested to get same out of Epsom Library (to their credit they had one other book by Gissing on their shelves) so that BH and I can read the thing in parallel. Or almost in parallel as BH does not always read books from start to finish and sometimes tackles them from other directions. I shall report further in due course.