pumpkinstrokemarrow

Another bit of inanity was posted in yesterday's DT. Our great leader of Cameron was moved to build on the growing tradition of asinine apology, in this case for the fact that certain parts of the population of certain parts of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent do not get on with each other too good. OK, so the whole thing blew off on our watch, but the not getting on had been going on for centuries before we arrived. Hopefully not for centuries after we left.

Perhaps I should suggest to our leader that he instructs our men and women in France to agitate for an apology from the President of France for the odd but still deplorable fact that people with Anglo-Norman names are still slightly richer than people with Anglo-Saxon names. Or perhaps we should agitate with the King of Norway.

And then we came across a much smaller inanity posted on a board outside our local hospital. Long may it live! The post told us that smoking will not be permitted in the car park and will not be permitted inside cars inside the car park. Leaving aside the bossiness which we allow our servants to get away with (notice that they avoid the 'your car park' speak for these purposes), I object to the grammar. It is not as if the NHS has posted a smoking warden in a watch tower in the car park who issues permission, or not, on every occasion that someone thinks to have a drag. Giving permission is not an active and ongoing thing; permission has either been granted or withheld. So, on the assumption that the notice was talking about a current prohibition and not a future one (in which the average dragger would have little interest), I think the notice should have told us that smoking is not permitted in the car park and so on. Should I send a 'disgusted of Epsom' email to the CEO of the hospital? Someone whom I suspect of being a lady and earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to water her KPIs. I wonder what her spelling and grammar is like.

Nearer home I have been reading 'The Legacy' by Sybille Bedford. This is the lady who wrote my two volume biography of Aldous Huxley. She is also a lady whom my mother liked to read, probably by association with Aldous H, the light of her sort of youth. I also remember going to a dramatised version of 'The Legacy' with her in London; I recall it being rather dull and my being rather adolescent about it. So there is track record. But for the life of me I cannot remember why I thought to read her now, which this morning I find irritating.

We almost certainly have had a copy at some point, probably my mother's, but it was nowhere to be found. Probably a victim of one of our culls. Next step was Surrey Library where I could find nothing by the lady in their online catalogue, never mind 'The Legacy', and was reduced to getting a copy from Amazon. This despite the book being billed as a modern master piece, this being old posh speak for number one international best seller. And which I now find to be both funny and informative - a very good fit with my recent Winder read (March 18) on Germany. The only catch being that the book is about a complicated family with complicated names and I should have been drawing up a diagram as I went along. Maybe I shall do better second time around.

I close with a computing irritation. HSBC seem to have done something with the presentation of their mastercard bills which results in a lot of black oblongs on the printed page, burning up untold amounts of genuinely expensive HP toner. I am fairly sure that this is a new irritation. Do their test packs not include printing stuff out on the sort of cheap printers that their customers are likely to be using?