By Martyn Turay
Marcel
Proust, great literary man, once wrote the above I think. It means roughly,
where are the snows of yesteryear? Total chaos hit London last month. My North Yorkshire
correspondent told me there was hardly any snow in Hull;
and though I saw a photo of a Lancashire waterfall frozen into a sculpture of
ice, seems London had heavier snow than anywhere
else in Great Britain
last month.
So you might say it’s reasonable to expect London Transport’s
total collapse and the closing of schools and offices becoz of six or seven
inches of snow. Even if Moscow
functions perfectly under 6feet of the stuff and temperature below minus 20
Centigrade.
I was going to rant about our British incompetence and extend my sympathy to the racehorse owning Russian oligarch who flew his private jet to Great Britain to watch gee gees at Wolverhampton only to find the meeting snowed off. Poor man (poor rich man but still) had to fly home. Driven near suicide by the whining Brits: “Sorry sir, its snowing.” Disgusted I imagine him looking out over the cloud tops above the North Sea and swilling vodka. And wondering what the point is?
But a lady friend glanced over my shoulder ands said, Oh how boring! How British! The weather! so I’m not going to mention snow plough technology and steam railway engines. I’m not. Honest.
Instead, like a man, I’m going to lose the thread and digress. A woman of course would handle the whole thing better and write a piss-elegant critique of the post-industrial state and Blairite economics or discuss Parent-teacher collaboration in schooling and Orgasms.
While I love orgasms and know parents and teachers ought to share more, I guess I’m only able to think or write about one thing at a time. Multitasking’s for the birds. I mean the ladies, me old sparer. Coz they can. Hence the renewed interest lately in multistranded processore architecture, the dual and many-cored chips now clocked around 2GHz are blatant Asimovian robosecretaries in camouflage. IBM’s whole R&D effort has for years revolved round trying to give male managers a handle on their female secretaries’ performance. A cool plastic box with a power On/OFF button and no periods. Even with 2GByte RAM and 100GB+ hard disc drive though, a PC can’t make a coffee or light a President’s cigar, let alone share his jokes (or orgasms). And it can’t flirt with the workforce and get the snow swept off the turf and electric heaters put out to get the course fit for a rich important guest. I’ll bet the top man at Wolverhampton racetrack had a Blackberry PDA instead of a girl on his knee that Monday morning.
So, gospodin, dobry din (or if you’re in Moscow
or Vladivostok dobry vyecher); and reflect on the many
differences between snows and men and women. And horses.
Marty
So you might say
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