June 2018 Diary

June was a good month. I had a week off from work, in the week before the weather turned really hot.

I did lots of gardening - always in the morning when it was cool. I now have a neat front hedge and a nice clean garden shed. The lawn has given up growing in this heat.

The big thing was buying three toys. A Bose Colour bluetooth speaker to replace the Roberts radio by my bedside. Now I can stream from all the music on my NAS via my iPhone. Falling asleep to some Gregorian Chant makes a welcome change from Chill on DAB. Second toy was a replacement laptop for my ageing Samsung. It’s an Acer Aspire with an Intel 8X chip, a 1TB HDD and a 1080p screen with wireless AC, and it was just over £500. I ordered that from Amazon and it arrived in July. Third toy was the Sonos Beam soundbar I saw in the Sonos shop in Covent Garden. It was on pre-order, and that’s coming in July as well. I’ve been thinking about all that stuff for a while, and getting all that sorted out was a good feeling.

I read Len Deighton’s Bomber, Micahel Jago’s The Man Who Was George Smiley, Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost In Math, Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrious, Andre Breton’s Nadja and Laurnet Binet’s The 7th Function of Language. Bomber really is something else, at times approaching a new kind of hyper-realist literature.

I saw Jeune Femme, Zama, and L’Amant Double at the Curzon Bloomsbury; and Hereditary at the Curzon Soho. I’ve now used all my four free tickets that come with Curzon memberships, and good value that makes it as well. I got through S5 of House as well.

I had supper with my mate in Richmond, and supper with Sis at Gymkhana. Gymkhana is way too expensive for what it is, which is not even, I think, superior Indian food. It’s not a lot better than you’ll get from your local takeaway. I also had supper at Tapas Brindisa (okay) and lunch at Polpo (good) in Soho, the Fish Market at Liverpool St (good), and lunch at Vinotecha (disappointing).

I started on the Great CD Ripping project. Using iTunes, which no less an authority than Hans Beekhuyzen says is fit-for-purpose. Classical CD’s and artwork? Only a handful had it, the rest has to downloaded from Amazon or Google.