Virgin Media Down and other stories

 Virgin Media has been down since 2300 last night and so I've not seen an e-mail yet today. That's probably of little importance but since Virgin have taken to charging me £101/month for their services I've begun to prefer service commensurate with such a quantum leap in their price structure.

While there may not be much of great consequence unread in my inbox, it might just be the day that Faber write to ask if they can do the Collected Poems, when Radio 3 offer me my own show, England want me to come out of retirement to open the batting and bowl leg spin to left-handers or Lauren & the Heatwaves require an album of retro dancefloor fillers for a new album.

If I didn't pay Virgin they'd soon want to know why but the relationship doesn't seem to work the same in the other direction. It's the same with the electric since OVO took it over but if they are the top end of my grievances with life I must be doing okay and so I don't bother about it much.

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More time to be spend on the Milan Kundera festival, then. Slowness and more than half of Farewell Waltz have flowed by. The story appears to be how Kundera gradually distanced himself from the novel as Jane Austen would have understood the form in favour of books more like essays, excursions into philosophy possibly also leaving anything Existential and Sartrean behind in pursuit of something more like Baudrillard and thus while looking profound and serious, flirting with the cerebral and possibly inconsequential as the ideas become ideas about ideas.

It's Parisian Prague Intellectual Chic. It reminds me of how the NME reviewer, I think it was, called Gregory Isaacs's Night Nurse album 'reggae chic' because it had left behind 'roots' and much of its origins to make an excellent job of something smoother, less demanding and, crucially, more likely to sell to a

'mainstream', and European, audience. It's not a bad thing. It was a great album.

There are a lot of Kundera essays. I'll see about those once the novels are read. Farewell Waltz is from 1977 and very recognizably a novel. Slowness came twenty years later and is less so. It's maybe like how cricketers really want to be golfers, poets want to be pop singers and pop singers want to be film stars. Novelists want to be philosophers. I'd much rather be a novelist or a musician or a pop song writer but the choice is not unltimately one's own. It's possible that not everybody's really convinced I'm a poet.

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New Acquisition. The new 'Blue Room' only needs the blinds fitted to be complete now. My friend's dispersal of his CD collection has landed me with giving a good home to those I
could, like Fleetwood Mac, Talking Heads and The Beatles so that, 60 years after She Loves You was my favourite record, I finally have it on record.

But Vermeer's Lady Seated at a Virginal arrived this morning in a £65 canvas print.

I'm not convinced. Like the Sickert Brighton Pierrots in the front room, I'm not sure it's right. The pinks of the evening sky in the Sickert look to me too much. I have seen that in the flesh whereas the Vermeer I haven't but surely it's too dark and not blue enough.

Also, with it being wrapped onto its frame, one loses the outskirts, like some of the viol in the bottom left corner. Surely it could be printed with a white border to wrap around so that what we see is the painting and not an art work without its edges, like a piece of music without its highest, lowest or first and last notes.

Never mind. I'm hardly going to trouble to return it. Maybe it's not art. Maybe its decor that only uses art as its selling point and I bought it. It might even be kitsch, as such. I can live with it.