With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.
Solemn the drums thrill: Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres.
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.
They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
They mingle not with laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.
“For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon, originally published in The Times on 21 September 1914, and the source of the more common “Ode to Remembrance”
There are times where I’m a real spanner – and it looks like last week was one of those times.
You see, ages back I booked myself for the @Media conference in London. And then forgot about it completely.
And it turns out it was last week – the Thursday and Friday, to be precise. Which means that last week would’ve been made infinitely more complex than it was, what with the Cambridge interview and the entire travelling to see AC/DC – but it’s still a bummer.
It’s weird too, in that I haven’t heard anything about it this year – nothing I’ve noticed on Twitter or Facebook, and none of the developers and techies I know having gone to it. Compared to a couple of years ago, when I knew loads of people who went, that just seems pretty odd.
It’s a pain to have paid for the ticket and not gone – but well, my company had paid for the ticket rather than me personally (it’s a semantic point in many ways, I know) so it could be worse.
Recently, my brain has been slightly locked with a question – one even the mighty AQA couldn’t come up with an answer to.
So I’m hoping that posting it on D4D™ might just find someone who knows what the hell it is I’m whittling on about.
Anyway – I read a book a while back, and I’m now trying to remember what the hell the book was. The scene I clearly recall involved one protagonist meeting the other for the first time in a school playground, where they were playing marbles. (At least, I think it was marbles – could’ve been tiddlywinks, or something)
Anyway, Person One knocks one of Person Two’s marbles out of play, and out of school grounds. As a result, Person Two throws one of Person One’s marbles out of the school grounds, and it degenerates into each one throwing the marbles out of the playground.
It’s a stupid scene, but I can’t remember where the hell it came from.
So help me, Interwebs, please…
When I go to see a concert – or even watching music programmes on TV etc. – one of the silly things that always impresses me is that the singers remember all the words.
For me, writing something down is the best way yet to forget it. It’s somewhere solid (even if that is only somewhere like here) and it’s somewhere I can find it again. So if I write it down, it’s effectively gone from my head.
That’s why (for me) it’s better to keep ideas in my head, rather than writing them down as an aide memoire – because it won’t aid me, I’ll just forget the entire thing.
So I find myself repeatedly in awe of the people who still know their lyrics, who can still produce them repeatedly at any given performance with seemingly no notes, reminders, hints or clues. To me that’s just awesome, regardless.
So what do you find yourself in awe of?
In similar vein to this post from last year, it’s worth pointing out that Masterchef is back on BBC2 again.
And still the contestants drive me potty with all the guff about “[Tristan] is aiming to change jobs, and go from being a stockbroker to living his dream by cooking”. No-one says “Well why don’t you fucking try it out properly first?” or “Wouldn’t it be an idea to cook for more than yourself?“. One bell-end last week claimed that he wanted to open “something like the Manoir, a restaurant with rooms” – I think he went out at the end of the first round, for doing something a) dull or b) raw. After a while they all blend into one, I’m afraid.
The judges don’t do much for me either. Both John Torode and Greg Wallace come across as pompous prats – although some of that could be the scripting too – but if I hear them saying “They’re doing a meal they’ve never cooked before. In a semi-final! Shocking!” I’ll just spit.
Yet I still watch the damn thing – even though a good 40% of it drives me crackers. (On this point, Sky+ is a godsend – it’s great being able to fast-forward through the repetition, ‘discussion’ of who stays in etc., and all the intermediate Pop Idol/X-Factor guff of contestants calling home to say they got through etc.) I find the ideas people have are interesting, the pro-kitchens can be interesting – and/or make me think “I would never go there to eat” – and the execution of the ideas and recipes is something I do enjoy watching. I’ve always been in awe of the people who can go to a kitchen cupboard and just pick five or six items and put them together, knowing that they’ll work out as a good meal. My mum could do that easily, Herself can do so too, and so can other friends but to me it’s just an awesome talent that I simply don’t possess.
I can cook – but I need a recipe, or some kind of inspiration to work from. Sometimes when watching Masterchef I can come up with what I’d do with the selection of ingredients on offer, but for me it’s more a memory thing, something I’ve seen in another magazine or recipe book. But I know I don’t have the knowledge – more accurately, the inbuilt/memorised knowledge – of the necessary methods in order to get to that final result.
