test please delete

[SimonMac]

It's so warm the kids have had ice cream, I resisted

[mudskipper]

Back from my bike ride. Rain threatened, but didn't appear. At one point it was quite sunny.

Knackered. Not fit enough.

[DaveB]

Club ride done. Positively hot and sunny for the cake stop.

Leftover chinese for lunch

[NickFitz]

Made a small fry-up for lunch. Sat down. Reached for cutlery. Phone rang.

It was my mum, pulling her trick of phoning just as I sit down to eat. She managed this despite it being about three hours earlier than she usually phones on Sunday, providing further evidence that there's some kind of crystal-ball/remote-viewing thing going on

[Pondlife]

Awesome lunch today. Two local lasses quit their office jobs and went on a 6 month tour of the states working at as many different bbq places as they could right across the country. When they got back they bought themselves a smoker and started doing pop up sessions at various pubs one night a week, always fully booked. Then they got themselves a food truck and now, finally, they've recently opened up their own place. Been trying to get a table for weeks.

Pit Plate Special: Pulled Pork, Brisket on Texas toast, Pork Ribs and Baked Beans (along with fries, slaw and pickles)

Words cannot express a) how tasty it was and b) how full I am.

Oh, and they have their own cookbook.

[zeitghost]

I prefer an upright.

The new one, hopefully, is now residing in the cardboard box next door.

Assuming that it corresponds with the number of the model I typed in at Argos.

In murrain of beasts news, it's still alternating with Simpsonesque.

Just been up the cemetery to see how the ZeitParents' grave is looking.

All I can say is that the flowers needed removing & the equisetum is taking the place over again.

There's a nice patch of selfplanted daisies doing quite well, together with some nigella.

I suspect some gel weedkiller is needed for the mares tails.

The ZeitGrandParentsAndAunt's grave has signs of some bulbs coming up, but the couch grass is making a return.

The other ZeitAunt's grave is unreachable now the knotweed is getting going again.

[NickFitz]

Just found a copy of the university's old arts magazine that I bought at Fresher's Fair in my first year. It contains a 1978 interview with Kingsley Amis in which he confirms that the university, or University College Leicester as it was then known, was the basis for the university in his novel Lucky Jim

I've remembered that fact since reading it in 1980, but I'd never been able to find a citation for it. Turns out I've had it sitting on my shelves all the time in a slim pamphlet-like thing that I thought I'd lost.

[zeitghost]

I had the impression it was based on University of Wales College Swansea as it was back then.

I may, of course, be conflating it with some other book.

I am, indeed, doing this.

Ho hum.

I wonder which book that is, then.

This didn't help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Two_Can_Play

[zeitghost]

The new ZeitVaxVacuumCleaner(tm) is duly assembled.

It's so fecking complicated that I can't figure out where all the tools go.

The Vax Swift was great coz everything you needed was on the vac so you never had to look for the feckers in a futile attempt to remember wtf you'd put them the last time it was used.

On the plus side, it seems to have successfully sucked half a carpet into the dust receptacle.

It's either vastly more efficient or extra good at wearing out carpets.

I look forward to building up different colour layers over the next couple of weeks.

[NickFitz]

I had the impression it was based on University of Wales College Swansea as it was back then.

I may, of course, be conflating it with some other book.

He worked there from 1949 to 1961, so Swansea would also have influenced him. But he says in the interview that it was on a visit to Leicester, where his friend from Oxford days Philip Larkin was then working as a librarian (from 1946 to 1950), that he had his first encounter with a provincial university Senior Common Room, and thought it would provide a good setting for a book.

He also says that one can work out various physical locations in Leicester University from the book, such as how to get from the Common Room to the library (though not any more, as the campus has changed quite a bit). And there's the cemetery directly across the road from the main entrance, which he says he included because "there is a sort of joke there".

And the eponymous Lucky Jim's surname is Dixon. Philip Larkin lived at 12 Dixon Drive during his time in Leicester

So Swansea doubtless also had an important role to play, but he says of Leicester's influence on the book: "It took a long time to grow, and it had no doubt several different sources but there was a kind of very quick step forward at that point."