Sawyl

03:08 pm: Melting from home
The hottest day of the year so far and instead of working from a nice cool office I've been working from home, stuck in a hot living room that's all long chain monomers and hot electronics. My appointment with my consultant — the reason for working from home — went well, although their primary advice was to wait for the full report and have a good think before making any sort of decision. So that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Tags: health, weather

08:42 pm: A long, long day at the office
An extremely long day in the office, frantically trying to complete a patching session ahead of the start of tomorrow's seriousness. Having got in at 7am, I didn't leave until 8pm and the closest I got to a break in between was a visit to the dentist...

Tags: work

10:00 pm: Health and Safety a la Grecque
Over on their blog, Pater has a good rant about a sudden H&S crackdown at their boatyard that is being used to gouge owners on the one hand and the workforce on the other:

It ... is now forbidden to sleep on boats in the yard, and it is forbidden to paint your own boat (a rumour that people would not be able to work on their own boats at all has been denied). Though this has not yet been put into effect, it will be part of the new contracts, which will include the labour cost of antifouling and half the cost of a hotel and car hire for ten days. To cover the cost of this the fees have been increased substantially. At the same time a contract no longer entitles you to use the marina, which means that an annual contract is pretty pointless. Moreover the yard has substantially cut the wages of its employees and increased their hours, with the promise of further cuts to come. The management pleads that this is all due to events outside their control — excessive demand for the marina, requirements of the health authorities, financial stringency. At best it is all a result of bad management, at worst it is a case of management trying to take advantage of the crisis at both ends, cutting costs by cutting wages and intensifying labour and raising revenue by jacking up fees.

Once a sociologist, always a sociologist...

Tags: family, sailing

08:47 pm: Progress of sorts
After weeks and months of chaos, things feel like they're finally starting to come back under reasonable control. There are signs of progress:

• at work, in the form of a handful of fixes which ought to address the current stability problems
• at home, in the form of articles that have been on my to-read pile since sometime in February
• with my feet, today being the first blister-pain free day I've had in over a month. With hindsight, I really shouldn't have continued to run on them after the first time they started bleeding

Now all I have to do is address the perennial question of my continuing education — something that comes round at this time every year, and bothers me for a month or so before I realise that, thanks to (a) doubts about my abilities, (b) worries about not being motivated enough, (c) an accute lack of confidence, enough time has passed to make the whole thing impossible for another academic year — and all my problems with be solved.

Maybe.

Tags: five random things

09:22 pm: Murder Must Advertise
And so to what is probably the most problematic of Sayers' Wimsey novels, Murder Must Advertise. Despite featuring some truly excellent elements, in the form of staff of Pym's Publicity, the mystery element of book falls rather flat while the supposedly thrilling fast set of debauchers prove to be rather less interesting than the eccentric set of advertising copywriters.

The story opens a week after the death Victor Dean, a young advertising copywriter with Pym's Publicity, with the arrival of his replacement. Mr Bredon, new to advertising but with a gift for puns and wordplay, quickly becomes a favourite around the office despite being excessively interested in how his predecessor managed to fall to his death down the office's iron staircase. After disguising himself as Harlequin and snaring the affections of Dean's former mistress, Dian de Momerie, Bredon discovers a link between Dian's set of drug-taking socialites and the staid surroundings of Pym's.

Despite ostensibly being a drug-smuggling mystery, the real focus of the book is on the office of Pym's Publicity and its cast of eccentrics. A mix of older, more conservative, state educated staffers and bright young things from Oxbridge, the office is a constantly bubbling cauldron of class tensions, childish practical jokes, salacious gossip, and appalling puns. Everyone is either Mr or Miss or a dubious nickname and one character's Christian name is only mentioned when his mistress pays an unscheduled visit to the office.

Of the office regulars, the confident and charming Mr Ingleby stands out as a particularly fine character. Both charming and childish, his fluency and cynicism make him a natural ally of Bredon's and give him a particular insight into the particularly foolish business of advertising:

The vitamines we destroy in the canning, we restore in Revito, the roughage we remove from Peabody's Piper Parritch we make up into a packet and market as Bunbury's Breakfast Bran; the stomachs we ruin with Pompagne, we re-line with Peplets to aid digestion. And by forcing the damn-fool public to pay twice over — once to have it's food emasculated and once to have the vitality put back again, we keep the wheels of commerce turning and give employment to thousands — including you and me.

Sayers makes good use of her own inside knowledge of advertising, making an important plot element turn on the last minute resetting of an advert that the publishing newspaper suspects may contain a double entendre. Not only does this feel archaic in the age of computerised publishing but the blind panic of the Mr Copley as he tries to contact his senior colleagues with messages left at homes and restaurants, feels particularly strange in these days of ubiquitous connectivity.

Sadly, everything outside Pym's feels rather thin in comparison. The de Momerie set aren't terribly interesting and it's hard to see how they might inveigle anyone. The pursuit of a man in evening dress by a hack with the unlikely moniker of Hector Puncheon doesn't really lift things all that much, nor do a couple of dissatisfied, kipper eating policemen. The established minor characters fair slightly better: Charles and Lady Mary come across as an extremely well suited, domestic couple; Freddie and Rachel Arbuthnot prop up the plot in a couple of places; while Helen Duchess of Denver continues to be the perfect snobbish ice maiden.

Tags: book reviews, peter wimsey

08:03 pm: Fire reaches Exeter
Got caught up in the torch traffic on the way back from my bike ride. I hadn't realised that the Exeter leg started as late as it did or that the relay route precisely mirrored my route home. Too tired to take a long diversion through the outskirts of town — I blame a combination of yesterday's ride and today's headwind — I found myself creeping along Topsham Road behind the rolling police road block.

Tags: cycling

12:51 pm: Goodbye Fischer-Dieskau...
First heard on this morning's CD Review, the sad news that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has died — the Guardian has a nice obit outlining his huge repertoire and considerable talent. Rather than go for an obvious bit of Schubert in honour of the great man — Der Erlkönig, for example — here's Fischer-Dieskau in Lord God of Abraham from Mendelssohn's Elijah:



Tags: music, videos

04:35 pm: Have His Carcass
Back to the Dorothy L Sayers re-read and Have His Carcass, which takes up the threads of Harriet Vane's story following the events of Strong Poison.

Changing on the body of a suicide on a deserted beach, Harriet Vane takes a few photos before heading off to call the police. Unable to find a nearby phone it is several hours before she returns with the police, by which time the corpse has been claimed by the rising tide. Although the police are able to identify the man in the photos as Paul Alexis Goldschmitt, a professional dancer at a nearby hotel, they're unable to hold an inquest due to the lack of a body. Concerned about Harriet's position and suspicious of the circumstances of the case, Peter Wimsey rushes down from town and starts investigating just why Paul Alexis — a man with a full beard and phobia of blood — should have cut his throat with a razor after travelling to a remote beach on a return ticket.

While generally rather good, Have His Carcass suffers from an excess of details in some places. By making Harriet the main character for much of the book, it becomes possible to get a much strong feeling for her personality and to start to understand why Peter is attracted to her. She's strong, independent and clever. She's also charming and capable: she vamps Henry Weldon with elan and successfully extricates herself when things look like they might go too far, she quickly becomes a confident of Weldon's mother, and has an easy facility with M. Antoine and the rest of the professional dancers.

Of the other characters, the oafish Henry Weldon is particularly good. His bumptious and obvious attempts to get Peter to drop the case are wonderfully mis-judged exercises in failed bonhomie. His view of Harriet is clearly coloured by his knowledge of the events of Strong Poison, and consequently misreads her flirtatiousness as promiscuity, only to be thrown when she rejects his groping overtures.

The plot is largely successfully but for an extended section in which Peter and Harriet crack a Playfair cypher belonging to Paul Alexis. Although admirably clear on the techniques used to crack the encryption, the whole episode is rather too long and reads a little bit like a description of two people trying to solve a sudoku! More successfully, Sayers pokes fun at the traditional whodunit problem of the time of the death by having Harriet struggle with the time of death in her own novel, and the key revelation about death, when it comes, turns out to have been skillfully foreshadowed.

Tags: book reviews, peter wimsey

09:19 pm: The Nations of the World
Via mental_floss, Wakko Warner's delightfully Gilbertian nations of the world song:


I'd forgotten just how funny — and filthy! — Animaniacs really was....

Tags: comedy

03:07 pm: The tortoise and the fridge
Random factoid courtesey of someone at Holland & Barrett: the vegetable drawer of the fridge is an ideal place to keep a hibernating tortoise. Ideal except, I imagine, if you want to keep your food and your pets separate...

Tags: weirdness