BOOJUM!: Conrad Is - Mildly Peeved

Hmmmmm The BBC Is At It Again

I shouldn't be surprised, it seems to be a Christmas tradition of theirs, if you will.

I refer, of course - obviously! - to their broadcast of "The Mezzotint" on Christmas Eve, for which a little background is required.

Montague Rhodes James was a scholar as well as an author, being the provost of King's College and Eton, whose academic work on the medieval era is still highly regarded. This chap not only knew his onions but his garlic and chives, too. Art!

"It's behind you!"

M.R. James is how we normally speak of him. His ghost stories feature no sex and only implied gore, yet they are very unsettling, and are a stern corrective for those who might be tempted to go poking about into things they most definitely ought not to. Why, one of his stories is entitled "A Warning To The Curious". Art!

"Who's there?*"

The story is about a mezzotint, which, being a kind of etching, one does not expect to change between viewings, although this one does.

OF COURSE - OBVIOUSLY! - the director, Mark Gatiss, has to go along with the BBC's inevitable "Twist In The Tale" that they ALWAYS add onto their M. R. James adaptations and which were most definitely not in the original stories. Here we have a sub-plot nailed on, where the protagonist is actually the illegitimate descendant of those who owned both the mezzotint and the stately home it depicts, and the TITT is that the ghastly intruder from the etching comes to get him, too**.

Bah!

All the same, motley, I think we'd better prime the anti-personnel mines and lash the windows shut with chains of silver. Just in case.

Spiderman!

Ha, you'll see what I did there. Yesterday NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope (see?see?) from the French site in Guyana, finally, after years of delays and recent postponements thanks to the weather. Art!

This is the moment when the solid-fuel boosters aside the main rocket begin burning and the Ariane 5 takes off. Conrad notes that the official NASA video is two and a half hours long, most of it just pictures of Ariane on the launchpad, with warnings to be on the lookout for jaguars - Health & Safety in Guyana's jungles is not the same as that in mainland Europe. Art!

This is about 9 seconds into the flight and mightily dramatic it is, too. However, see all those clouds in the background? Yes, that's also a consequence of having your launch site in the tropics: a very low cloud base. Thus after twenty seconds - Art!

Gone in twenty seconds. Rather a let down, frankly. Conrad is grateful that the thing didn't explode on the launch-pad, which would have been exciting and dramatic for us spectators but an unbelievable tragedy for the launch crew.

We may come back to the JWST, IF you are good.

Time For More Of The Supernatural As Written By Me

I believe that the distinction between a ghost and a spirit is that a ghost merely appears and mooches around, and it cannot do you any great harm lest your heart is a trifle dodgy. Whereas a spirit can interact with the real world, so beware if you stir up any nasty ones. With that -

‘Your assailant of this afternoon admitted himself to the local A and E, where he was interviewed about the attack he made on you. Denied it all, of course, and he has a couple of people to give him an alibi.’

Bugger! swore Louis internally. That was all he needed.

Detective Oswald lectured him before leaving.

‘Take that Final Warning seriously, Mister McMahon. In future, if any trouble happens here, call 999 and leave us to act the heavy. Do not take the law into your own hands.’

The younger officer hung back in the doorway when they left.

‘Between me and you, I doubt Robbins will be back. Ruptured testicle. We read him the riot act, too. And his mate took two hundred quid off him to get the car windows repaired.’

After that, Louis’s appetite had gone. He chucked the partly-thawed meal in the bin.

‘Tastes shit anyway,’ he muttered to himself.

‘Language!’ trilled that semi-ethereal voice.

Going to bed meant lying in darkness thinking, thanks to a complete lack of substances able to stun his thought-processes into welcome oblivion.

‘Jen?’ he called, before going upstairs. She appeared out of nowhere, six inches in front of him.

‘Damn! Don’t do that so suddenly!’ he scolded, taken by surprise and leaping backwards like a skittish colt.

‘You called?’

‘Yes. For C – for – just don’t appear in my bedroom tonight, okay? And DON’T sit on the end of my bed. It took years off my life when you did last night.’

‘Okay,’ she peeped.

That was it? It was that easy? Surely there was a catch.

‘What do you do when you’re not here?’ asked Louis, being curious – or nosey – again.

‘I look and learn. There are other spirits out there, Luma, and I’m learning from them. I look at the world, I look at people, I look and I see.’

He had to stop himself asking more questions there and then.

No more! Off to bed!

Where he lay awake from ten until one in the morning, thinking about how the world had changed so suddenly.

No, the world hadn’t changed, had it? Just the way he witnessed it. Eighteen years of skepticism turned topsy-turvy overnight, with the corrollary that if spirits were real phenomena, then whatever else he’d dismissed as supernatural rubbish might also be real. Sobering stuff. Sobering because the world’s major religions might well be based on reality; sobering because Louis McMahon might very well have to face up to an entity known rather familiarly as “God’ and be judged on his life and acts –

Life had been so much simpler as a solipsistic ingrate.

O go on then - an extreme form of philosophy that holds the only provable thing is one's own existence. Happy now?

Back To More Cheerful Matters

Once again I cannot remember how I managed to find this Youtube video, only that I did, and it's quite uplifting. The scene is an airport in Ireland, where flights have been delayed and passengers are sitting in abject musery (which is like misery, except worse) until - Art!

Here you have a trio of Irish musicians Daoiri Farrell, Geoff Kinsella and Robbie Walsh, who had been at a music festival. They played "Galway Girl", a song I've never heard before, and immediately lift everyone's spirits***. Herein the link:

Flight delayed, so famous Irish musicians play for the passengers in jam session - YouTube

If feeling at all down, this will pick you up.

Finally -

I got to test-drive a cup of my Christmas present, First Flush Darjeeling from the Margaret's Hope plantation, this morning. I shan't be drinking this on a daily basis as it's VERY expensive. First thoughts: it's a lot weaker than the loose-leaf version I get from Sainsbury's, and is a lot more refined in flavour. It will take a good half-dozen tasting sessions to adapt my palate (what there is of it).