Sales, biographies and diamond pattern waistcoats

With our streets still looking like our freezer in need of a severe defrosting we've had a quiet weekend only venturing out for a short trip to the local shopping centre yesterday and the gym today for our Sunday worship (body worship in this case). The trip to the shopping centre was the first time Ka and myself had plucked up the courage to face the shops since before Christmas and it turned out to be a marginally successful trip with an exchange being made and a few items being found in the sales and a few chance encounters with other friends battling through the mob. I managed to get a rather excellent suit jacket, reduced from £90 to £26 after hesitantly asking a reluctant sales assistant for a chest measurement. Asking her if she reckoned the jacket would fit I ended up having to talk her into throwing her measuring tape around me. As it happened the jacket was a perfect fit and will prove perfect for when the wife takes me out to dinner. In the same store I also got a spiffing navy jumper with a blue diamond design over it's front. Ben Sherman, reduced from £30 to £15. In fact, after purchasing it, I realised it reminded me a lot of a waistcoat that came with the suit I hired for my High School formal. The occasion when you all go out, at the end of your last, or second last, school year and hire a suit, dressing like move stars for a night. Most people getting the smart black tuxedos which I did indeed get but me, having to be different, decided for an additional diamond pattern coloured waistcoat. Maybe the jumper wasn't such a great buy after all - I seem to remember that waistcoat made me look like one of those comedy snooker players. All I needed was a large pair of square spectacles. It certainly did not have much of an effect on the night as I failed to get a dance for the duration of the formal but then I never got a dance at those High School functions anyway (violins please!). In retrospect maybe that's why I wore the waistcoat anyway, because I knew I had no chance. The only vague chance I had that night was with a bottle of MD 20/20, lime flavour, and that was shared between four of us.
Ka managed to buy a couple of pair of shoes in the sale too, surprise surprise. Soon we'll be needing a Carrie Bradshaw wardrobe for the amount of shoes she has. As I sit at my computer writing this blog the shoes are stacked in the open wardrobe above me, the large shelf trembling with the shoe strain. Ka will say the same about me though with books.
I've just finished 'The Moon's a Balloon' the late, great David Niven's autobiography, written around thirty eight years ago. My Dad lent me it to read just before Christmas as I had always been curious about this book which had lasted for so long at the top of my Mum and Dad's living room unit. Niven was an actor through the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties and played opposite many of the old greats including Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn and the like. One of the old school before I was even born. What a life Niven led. Now he did have plenty to write about. I wonder if he ever had the fashion sense to get a diamond pattern waistcoat?
There's always a slight influx of biographies and/or autobiographies at Christmas. This year Ka got me the Chris Evans book and Auntie Tricia got me the Jack Dee autobiography. Jack Dee I've always liked because of his great dry sense of humour and his fantastic smile. A few years back I would not have even considered reading a autobiography by Chris Evans but ever since he took on the evening job at Radio 2 he's got me through many a late night Tuesday shift with his banter. Of course that'll be no more now that he's taken Wogan's show on in the mornings so I'll just have to hope they'll have a half decent replacement for the evening shift. Either that or I switch on the old iPod.
My Chrimbo present from Ka this year was a belter. A beautiful deep purple iPod Nano. There's no Deep Purple on it yet but maybe I'll look into remedying that. It's both funky and functional with stunning graphics to help you navigate through your music library. The library I've just started to build up in the past week. Fantastic. I'm just off to put more tunes on it.

Black and white

Weather. Always a good conversation piece for folk when your struggling for subjects to talk about. On my way to work today it very much felt like winter was most definately here. The sky was clear with only the occasional strip of cloud hiding the luminous pale blue hanging overhead. These are the kind of winter mornings I like though. Freezing, but light and clear with the sunlight streaming through the tree tops over the edge of Calderglen. The sunlight in stark contrast with the cold temperatures. It is not as cold as it will get though. Today it has been around 5 degrees celcius but tomorrow the weather report is saying it will be more in the region of 2 degrees celcius but with less cloud. It is strange how I feel more at home in the winter weather than in the sweltering heat of a good summer. Perhaps I was an eskimo in a former life... or a penguin. According to religions, such as Hinduism or Buddhism, a human is supposed to be a higher form of life than the animal which would mean I must have been a good penguin in the former life. Maybe I caught lots of fish and shared them out to all my penguin pals. Not everything's black and white though.
The BBC Trust have finally got round to giving their final decision on the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross nonsense stating there was no justification for the errors that were made in the production of the programme concerned. Really? No way! Who pays these people? Oh, yeah, that's right. US. It's been over three weeks for them to state the obvious. As the 'innocent' female concerned said on the news tonight - we are all so bored of this story. Why is it still in the news then? As I said when it first blew up in the gutter press three days after it actually happened - get over it. There are more important things to concern ourselves over. Getting Ross back on the telly! I've got to go out tonight now because there's no Jonathan Ross on!
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe had a great ten minute piece on it, on Tuesday night, in his usual entertaining, sarcastic, indomitable way. The guy is a genius. Another guy with a similar humour is the brilliant Jack Dee whom I just happened to catch getting interviewed on This Morning yesterday. Not that I usually watch this Morning or anything... I was just finishing my breakfast tea with a bacon buttie. He was talking about his new series of Lead Balloon, his drama comedy series on BBC Two. Regretfully, I've not caught any of this series yet but it looks pretty good. May have to check it out.
The new car is flaimin' filthy. How come dirt on a car shows up more on black paintwork? You'd think it would be the opposite wouldn't you? I always thought it would be a nightmare owning a white car. JP says it's the salt on the road. Salt on the road? Haven't even seen any salt spreaders on the roads yet, firing it's load of grit at your windscreen. Soon we'll be scraping the ice off the windows and getting high on de-icers again. Could the snow be on it's way?