With enormous pleasure we have now discarded all the Christmas decorations, lobbed the tree out of the door, and greeted in the New Year. We’ve also chucked all the Christmas cards in the fire, along with the addresses that we will spend half of next December searching for.
2007. Wow, when I was young I thought we’d all have floating cars and live in glass domes by now. I can’t actually remember why I thought we’d all live in glass domes in the future, since when I was seven I knew nothing about global warming, and had never even heard of George Bush or Kyoto, but I definitely remember drawing pictures of glass domes…
I hope you’ve all made your New Year Resolutions – work longer hours, spend less time with the family, move to France and run gites etc. Myself, I have resolved to build an enormous glass dome on top of our barn, ready for next year. The rest of the family have resolved to spend a little bit more than I can earn, just to keep me motivated.
I did have some lovely and interesting comments on this blog as usual over Christmas and the New Year – for example: “Good observation, your ideas are right on”; “Let him choose out of my files, his projects to accomplish.“ Shakespeare, Coriolanus; Better hope the life-inspector doesnt come around while you have your life in such a mess.”; “Like what you have to say. Your blog makes good sense to me¦.”.
Unfortunately, all these comments had one thing in common – they were accompanied with lots of links to sites selling all sorts of products to enhance my sex-life, and were posted by machines and robots. I never quite envisaged ‘blog spamming’, as it is known, when I was seven years old, scratching pictures of space rockets on the school wall and dreaming of laser-beams.
On a chirpier note, Mrs B and older daughter have just been off in Bordeaux for a couple of days spending our hard-earned cash and living it up, which sounds nice. Happily the hotel they stayed in was so cheap that when they took their showers they had to stand holding the showerhead over each other because it wasn’t fitted to the wall. I approve heartily of cheap hotels for the rest of my family and unashamed luxury for myself.
We just read that Peter Mayle (of ‘A Year in Provence’ fame) is returning to Provence, after abandoning it for 20 years – apparently, he was driven out by the tourists that he himself had attracted, the final straw being when he stopped a coachload of people who were marching up his front path. When asked why, they simply said “you are on the tour”. Oh, that this blog should have people rifling through my dustbins to learn more about us. The fame, the glory!
More spookily, we learned about Peter Mayle and his troubles from a free English language newspaper that turned up in our letterbox. Nothing spooky about that, but the address used was not quite right – it is an address that I believe only one other person (rather, a small local financial company) uses – an enterprise that we have some dealings with. Does the Data Protection Act not exist in France? While I expect my email address to get sold to the highest bidder, I think it’s pretty sad that my ‘real’ address is treated the same way.
Anyway, with Mrs B out of the way, I settled down last night with younger daughter to watch a strange programme on the television about somebody setting up a Dinosaur park. Perhaps everyone else in the world has seen this already, but I thought it was pretty spooky – and younger daughter was convinced they were real. The dinosaurs certainly looked pretty close to real, ambling around among the people, and it won’t be long before truth and fiction are completely impossible to separate on the television. During the forthcoming French presidential elections for example.
Speaking of which (technology, not politics), during the Christmas festivities I saw a computer game at a friends house where the player of the computer game got filmed ‘live’ during the game, and incorporated in the game, where they could fight computerised aliens, clean unreal windows, and so on. Am I out of touch because I live in the wilderness? Perhaps everyone else plays these games all the time and I have become Neanderthal, completely out of touch with the surreal world all around me. Once upon a time I could show off because I was first in my class to have an LCD watch.
Happily I already know how to clean windows and have no wish to fight, so it’s probably not all that important really.
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