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Well, I had a very mixed day yesterday.
I’d booked a day of annual leave, thinking
it’s nice to have a midweek day off before Christmas to do any final bits of
shopping and so on. Also I had a ticket for “Robert le Diable” and that
started at 6pm, so I was going to have to ask to leave work early at the
least. Since in the event I’d done all my Christmas shopping, I had a
lazy morning and then went to the V&A to have a mooch and see the “Ball gowns”
show (which closes in early Jan).
It was a very odd show – the first half
(mostly from the 50s and 60s, with a few more modern classics) was about 80%
terrific, and the second half (contemporary designers’ red-carpet gowns) was
about 80% terrible. If it had been selected with the express purpose of
demonstrating that the contemporary applied arts are just as desperate as the contemporary
fine arts to be innovative at any and all cost, even if it means being crap, it
couldn’t have made its point better (& I think it was meant to have
demonstrated how damned hip and wonderful they are!).
And as for the opera; well, I actually left at the interval
– only the second time in my life I’ve ever done that. It STANK.
The music itself was uninspiring (alternately hammy-rumbly and sugary-tinkly),
and the production was irredeemably bad. It was “ironic”, and so
heavy-handedly so as to be just plain embarrassing. I’ve seldom seen
anything so unrelentingly cheesy in my life.
At least if one went to Disneyland the cheesiness would be
sincere; this was all eye-rollingly superior. I swear it was more self-consciously knowing
than a Carry-on film, and without the redeeming silly humour. It sucked.
My heart ached for the poor cast, who were bravely doing their best, with rubbish
to sing and a director with his brain up his arse.
You will gather I hated it.
I then went home, feeling rather cross, and got on with some
typing, and the laptop got hiccoughs and wouldn’t save. In the end I left
it running, with its little error message saying something along the lines of
“I can’t do this, why are you asking me to do this?” and went to bed. I
arranged a large book propped open to mask the light from the screen, and tried
to ignore the constant chuntering-computer sound, but of course I couldn’t
sleep with it purring away a few feet from me. I got up at 1am and
checked, and it was still jammed, and I thought “sod you, then” and switched it
off at the wall... So will probably go home tonight to an injured
complaint of “you switched me off in a bad way, you’re a mean missy”. I
don’t know if the stuff I had typed (about two thousand words) will have been
saved or not. There’s supposed to be an automatic back-up-save every ten
minutes, so in theory I shouldn’t have lost too much (cross fingers).
Poor old laptop, I think I do have to accept that it’s nearing the end of its
useful life.
At any rate, by the time I had relaxed enough to actually get to sleep after all that, I had less
than six hours before my alarm went off.
I think I was still pretty stressed about the laptop, since I then had a
really weird dream. It was a glorious
summer day, and my mum’s friend Ninetoes and Robert Downey Jnr. were helping me
to move house. I had bought a lovely big
house with a garden, and as house-move-help goes, Ninetoes and RD Jnr. made a pretty
great team (at least once she had stopped making eyes at him), so things weren’t
all bad by any means. The downsides were
RD Jnr. insisting on playing just one song, over and over, on the stereo in the
pantechnicon (I have nothing against Duffy, but “Beggin’ you for mercy” has
fairly repetitive lyrics when you hear it just once, let alone six times in a
row) and the bizarre house-warming gift I had been given from work; a urine-driven coffee-maker.
My subconscious goes to some very strange places at
night. As new green energy concepts go,
I think wee-power will take some beating.
