“The most villainous looking set of hope-abandoned thieves I ever saw” - A description of the UK’s departing members of parliament? Most apt but no; Albert Smith’s description of a group of Chinese priests in the city of Canton. Is Canton still Canton or is it now named something else? Street names, town names, country names, they change so fast. Will the next lot of M.P’s the British vote in next month be any better than the last? and he who casts the first stone, glass houses and all that, let the Brits no longer sneer about Greek corruption or any other country’s corruption because they are all at it. Little piggy snouts in big piggy troughs, endless tax payers’ money to spend. What I find difficult to understand is how every country seems to be in the red. Even China is reporting a trade deficit. Are there any that have an enormous balance of payments surplus? And, if so, how do they manage it and aren’t they the lucky ones?
I have just finished burning two discs of “The Cinelli Vases”. After my previous near disaster losing the hard drive and a whole heap of information with it, despite Spiro’s brave attempts to rescue it all and only managing to rescue some, a fair part admittedly but still only some, in fact a goodly portion of “The Cinelli Vases” disappeared so now no chances are taken; every bit of writing is burnt onto those two CD’s as a matter of course. In fact I don’t wait until the end but do it as I go along. Better safe than sorry and all those other old clichés. Come to think of it I wonder if Elf and Safety use that as their motto.
What I find completely mind-blowing is the whole process takes no more than a few seconds – a complete 90000 word novel is burnt in that short time. It’s little wonder we’re all going around the twist. The speed of change is so rapid the human brain can’t cope, mine can’t anyway. Only kidding – I think.
Looking back to the early days, the little Olympic portable typewriter I carried with me to locations; I took it to the south of France when I was working for Sydney Box and I remember I took it to Madrid when I was writing that silly Xavier Cugat TV special that in the end came to nought, and the big heavy old typewriters I used to use and then the electronic typewriters whose ribbons in cassettes could not be wound back and forth to be reused time and time again, were very expensive and with which one still made mistakes – now with the computer those mistakes are eradicated immediately and one can type away at the rate of knots knowing it doesn’t matter, there’s no longer any need for erasers or Typex.
My first computer on which one used floppy discs is now an antique, a museum piece, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to realise this one I am currently working on falls into the same category. That’s how quickly it all happens.