Stewing

I spent today stewing in my own juices, barely able to concentrate at work. Sometimes it seems like so much of life is taken up by the miserable, selfish, hurtful people that there is precious little left for those who deserve our time and affection.

Romantics

Today saw my return to University which began with The Romantic Century; a module being taught by my favourite lecturer, whom the few of us who actually appreciate, affectionately refer to as The Prof. He is wonderfully enthusiastic about his subject and refreshingly unabashed in his praise; in describing the authors he loves he uses the most passionate, literary language and often plunges headlong into emotional readings of them. In his assignments he seems as interested in the quality of the prose as he does the extensiveness of the research, something I fear is secondary to many scholars on the strength of the modern journals I read last year.

In his good natured optimism, and faith in those put in front of him, he has a tendency to assume a level of knowledge and understanding simply not present in many of his students, and consequently alienates more of them than he invigorates. Selfishly, I hope he never tones it down or aims for "the lowest common denominator" (ugh!) since I find his tutorials thoroughly inspiring.

Today he asked rhetorically: "... and who can have grown up in this country and be unfamiliar with the beautiful poetry of Thomas Gray? The immortal lines of his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?" Everybody nodded sagely of course, but I knew that I hadn't come across Gray until last year, and I'd be willing to wager there were plenty in that room who were hearing of the poet for the first time.

This set me thinking about the modern day disconnection we English have from our own culture, and how this manifests itself in our attitudes and behaviour. It certainly rang true for my own desire to live somewhere the sun shines more frequently - how much of that dream comes from a lack of identification with my home? Would I feel the same had William Cowper been on the curriculum at school? (In place perhaps of some worthy, yet less immediately relevant, American author)

ENGLAND, with all thy faults, I love thee still-
My country! And, while yet a nook is left
Where English minds and manners may be found,
Shall be constrain'd to love thee. Though thy clime
Be fickle, and thy year most part deform'd
With dripping rains, or withr'd by a frost,
I would not yet exchange thy sullen skies,
And fields without a flow'r, for warmer France
With all her vines...

Stoneleigh Abbey

Today my fiance and I made good on our promise to visit some "brown signs", although, as it turned out, there weren't very many of them on route to guide us to our destination.

We chose Stoneleigh Abbey partly because I'm reading Pride and Prejudice for my course. Jane Austen's family owned the Abbey, and, although she only visited once, she was sufficiently inspired to include elements of the estate in her novels. On Sundays they actually run a Jane Austen tour so we got to hear all about her family and how they came to inherit the beautiful sandstone buildings and attendant grounds. Below is a picture of the Gatehouse which is where the Monks would "make merry":



The grounds were beautiful in that landscaped Renaissance way; complete with rolling hills and clumped woodland, there were even some sheep grazing in the distance:




We were shown around the newest addition to the Abbey: a huge neo-classical manor house which was added at some point in the 18th Century, and is where Jane Austen would have stayed when she visited. The ceiling in the first room we entered had some pretty unusual plasterwork: the sculpted limbs of the figures depicted actually protrude out of the ceiling, making the whole thing seem eerily three dimensional. I managed to get this shot before the guide informed me that photography was prohibited inside the Abbey:



After the tour we headed into nearby Kenilworth for a nice Sunday lunch and a few ales. We got chatting to some locals, and enquired about the large police presence we'd noticed on the way into town - they informed us that the annual Horse Trading Fair was on today, and that things got pretty rough after the show when they all hit the pubs. We were surprised to learn that those involved in the rearing and trading of horses would be predisposed to violence, and said as much. We were offered, by way of explanation: "They're all Gypos".

We managed to get home safely (avoiding the marauding horse traders, of course) and have decided to return to the area fairly soon to see Kenilworth Castle.

Death Magnetic

Metallica's new album is a triumphant return to form, I'm enjoying it immensely. It's like St. Anger never happened.

Car Trouble

A little over a year ago, when I decided to return to University, I had to contend with a plummet in income and an impressive array of debt. One of the solutions was to sell my pride and joy: my one year old Toyota MR2 Roadster. I was sad to see it go but despite taking a blanching loss on the car I was able to settle some of said debts and had a little left over with which to purchase a cheap but reliable runaround.

The trouble is that I couldn't bring myself to settle for a small engined shopping trolley after zooming around in my beloved little sports car, so I decided to look into old BMWs. My logic, such as it was, ran that German cars are reliable, and big engined ones are cheap - flawless. £1800 bagged me a 1992 325 auto coupe with a remapped engine producing over 200bhp. It was black, had leather seats and and M3 styling kit. OK so it had 128000 miles on the clock, but "these things go forever when looked after". Sweetening the deal was the fact that the motor came from a local BMW breaker come service centre recommended by a neighbour - not only that but it had been the runaround of the chap who owned the place and he had taken good care of it. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, everything. I was in high spirits the first time it let me down: having just aced the third interview for my current job, I could feel the cloud of financial doom that had been hanging over my head starting to break ever so slightly. With the sound of a choking engine they rolled back over twice as fast, twice as black and twice as doom-laden. Not being a member of any roadside assistance outfit I had to resort to calling my girlfriend, getting her to drive out to Walsall and use her roadside assistance (RA) membership - claiming that she'd been driving my car all along.

After a few hours the RA man arrived, only to discover that his fancy new van was too tall to fit up the ramp to the car park. With much cursing and ill humour he arrived on foot with a bag of tools and an inability to do anything useful when not plugged into his van. There followed a bad tempered attempt at starting the car with some magic fuel spray, a cursory check of the battery and spark plugs and the resigned conclusion that we would have to wheel the car down the ramp to where his van was parked.

My poor girlfriend had never driven the car before, but it had to be her behind the wheel as it took the RA man and I all of our strength the get the thing moving up to the top of the ramp. She then had the unenviable task of thundering down a very steep spiral ramp with no power steering and then trying to stop the metal lump at the bottom with unassisted breaks. A hair raising crossing over a very busy road using the raw acceleration of two unfit men pushing a heavy car took us to the car park wherein was the van.

The garage were very good about taking the car back in and lending me a car whilst they looked at it - they did this several times but were unable to get to the bottom of the issue. Finally after a being practically taken apart and put together again for the third time I had the car back with assurances that there was nothing wrong with it. In some ways it had improved - it started first time almost every time and the smell of fuel was no longer apparent. Elsewhere, though, things had gone seriously awry: the instrument panel would not light up, the central locking was shot and one of my windscreen wipers fell off.

After replacing my wiper and cracking my windscreen in the process (£70 replacement on the insurance) I had had enough - three months of hassle and I still didn't have a car I could rely upon. I took it back to the garage along with a quote from BMW for £2,500 worth of repairs and demanded a replacement or my money back. The owner was not pleased at all but he virtually relented and gave me a 1996 316 coupe with a similar mileage. Noting that the car started first time and the electrics were working I felt I had little choice but to accept.

Thus far it has not let me down. Although I've had to replace some consumables and fend off some spurious speeding tickets (the plates were coned!) I've been pretty pleased with it. About a month ago it went in for an MOT and got through with only a spot of welding on the underside: £100 including the MOT, not bad for a twelve year old car with 130,000 on the clock and 13 previous owners!

Of course this was not to be the end of my car troubles. I had made the fatal mistake, when looking for a good MOT centre, of accepting my father in law to be's help. You've heard the expression "give someone an inch and they'll take a mile" no doubt? Well he'll take your mile and several more besides, ridicule them, beat you about the head with them and then set fire to them - all the time with the attitude that he's doing you a favour. That's probably a bit extreme, not to mention a clumsy nonsensical extended metaphor, but sometimes there's a need to lash out - albeit obscurely, from the safety of a blog which they will (hopefully) never read.

Anyway, when the MOT chap pointed out a few things which would need doing soon on the car, I was roped into trying to do them myself with the help of said parent. This must sound very ungrateful, but rest assured there are other reasons for a less than welcoming response to the aggressive mile taking (perhaps to be explored at a later date) but for now I will concern myself with explaining how an offer of help constitutes mile taking:

My girlfriend's dad has the zeal for DIY that only those with absolutely nothing else to occupy there time have. He is lucky enough not to work and therefore has the time to DIY a great deal - he is also very practically minded and good at this sort of thing. I cannot claim to have the same amount of spare time, nor the practical skills to compete with him in this arena, so I tend to pay for things to be done rather than spend frustrating hours not enjoying learning how to do them, only to be disappointed with the results. I would rather spend the time I have on improving the skills which are useful to me in the career path I wish to pursue, and doing things that I happen to enjoy, too. This is viewed by my girlfriend's father as a massive character flaw, not to mention a scandalous waste of money.

Already weakened by having accepted his advice on an MOT centre (which in fairness was good) and feeling the financial pinch more acutely after four months without student support, an expensive holiday, an engagement ring... I felt it difficult to refuse his kind offer of helping me to fit my front break pads and change my spark plugs. What this actually entailed was several days of abortive attempts due to having the wrong tools and eventually having to pay to get them done anyway. I did learn to take apart my rear light cluster and put it back on (due to a leak) but the end result of those wasted days was a clearer understanding of what I can't do to my car. Of course this was seen as largely my fault for not scouring the Haynes manual for references to obscure tools. Obscure, I think, being modern - his tools are well suited to working on his 60s car but not so much a modern BMW. Still seem a bit harsh? Well, maybe, but keep in mind that we receive this kind of admonishment for all the things which need doing around the house, the garden... all the things we have neither the time nor the inclination to do but which to him seem easy, and a monument to our infernal laziness.

My Reads

I have started a new blog with a literature theme: http://My-Reads.blogspot.com It is where I will talk about the things that I read.

Christmas

Somebody told me the other day how many weeks there are left until Christmas, I think they said fifteen, which doesn't seem very far away. Where does the time go? The summer is almost over, I'm back at BCU on the 26th, and I've still not finished blogging about New Orleans... where's the pause button?

Wes Anderson

Is one of my favourite directors, I discovered last night. Criminally, I often pay little attention to who directs the films that I like, but after watching Rushmore and deciding that it had to be the same director as The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and the Darjeeling Limited, IMDB revealed to me the source for all of this pleasure.

There is a kind of homely familiarity to his films, not least because they often star the same actors (including the wonderful Bill Murray) and have the same gentle, subtle - yet slightly odd - take on life.