Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There might not be many pop albums worth reviewing these days - in my ungenerous estimation - but doing it is made easy on a computer, as above. You can have the album playing on You Tube, a lyrics website open elsewhere and type it in, all on the same screen. The old 70's gunslingers on the NME sat in an office with a record player, a record sleeve and a typewriter and that must have been quite complicated in comparison but at least they had better records to listen to.

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I took part in the BBC's Abba vote where you can allocate 5 votes as you see fit across their list of tracks. I'm very much on an outsider with The Day Before You Came but it's a class apart. I gave that 4 votes and 1 to Knowing Me, Knowing You.

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I see Rolling Stone had Dancing Queen at no.1 and that could be favourite but it's an open heat. On safer ground, I hope you all came here and heeded the Grand National advice particularly as I said I had a second free shot at the race but 'doubled down' on I Am Maximus because I couldn't find anything else I believed in so much and so now I Am Wiseguy-imus. 

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It looks like our Saturday nights with Maigret on Talking Pictures have come to an end but they were a great pleasure and lasted for a year's worth. Bruno Cremer continues in French with sub-titles on Tuesday nights.

I was very pleased with myself below with my comparison of Simenon and Balzac but it seems I'm not the first to have made it. Pierre Assouline includes it in his comprehensive account. That wouldn't have been the easiest biography to write given the amount of books there are to have read.

There might be a lot of things to 'admire' about Simenon, such as the prodigious output and energy but, like a lot of writers, he doesn't seem easy to like - probably on account of the necessary self-possession necessary to be such. Not much came between him and his ambition and he negotiated a way through wartime France by means of as much good luck as good judgement or perhaps moral fibre. His politics were a confused business in as far as he had any which could be said of many 'right-wing' people and that's probably what he was although not in a Nazi way.

As a writer he wanted to be more than the Maigret and pulp fiction man and maybe he could have been but he was interested in making money, too, and the contrast between his monetizing of his art compared to James Joyce's makes for two different ways of approaching literary creation.

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So, with my own monetizing activities in good order after Aintree, we go to Cheltenham well aware that Mr. Henderson's horses are capable of winning again and he will want to make up for lost time in what remains of the proper jumping season. That will be Plan A on what is often a wide-open card.

One mustn't fret about money lost or, by the same token, money not won. Cashing in most of my little escapade into football on Arsenal top 4 with Leicester, Derby and Wrexham to be promoted could easily have been a mistake but if Leicester falter further and go into the rigmarole of play-offs, that'll do. Otherwise I'll have to try to see it as an 8/1 shot landed rather than half of a 16/1 winner thrown away.

One has to be phlegmatic. Winning is the point of it and I'm doing that, worrying about by how much only makes one seem like a fat bloke wanting another pie.

Great Western Rail are repaying my journey back from Swindon in full after their usual hapless attempt to organize some trains so I got paid for hanging round at Westbury for two hours. It must cost them a fortune doing something they are so bad at. Perhaps they should move into water management or run the Post Office with a system designed by Fujitsu.

It's not funny, though. About 25 years ago I went to Winchester for a big meeting about problems with work computer systems that were provided by Fujitsu.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as it were.