Tom Roper's Weblog

Once more on striped ties

After posting my diatribe this morning, it occurred to me that readers might reasonably ask if striped ties may be found in my wardrobe. I have nothing to hide, indeed I once planned a blog devoted entirely to ties, with photographs, and daily posts showing that day's choice  accompanied by a full and frank disclosure of the reasons for my choice, accompanying shirt and suit, and so on. I have the following (photographs to follow):

Red and black diagonal striped tie from Hackett. Bought about ten years ago, slightly faux-regimental, but still good.

Blue diagonal striped tie from Liberty. Bought more recently. Good, but difficult to pair with shirts.

Old school tie: purple and white stripes on a navy ground, with pelicans. Rarely worn.

What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing

Alas, I have no column in Milady's Boudoir but I have noticed that every second tie-wearer sports something with diagonal stripes. In pastel shades, and with stripes of irregular thickness, these bear no relation to the school ties of old, such as the purple and black forced round my neck from 1966-73. I think them rather  hideous

Backward Glance at Brighton's Komedia

J'ai perdu mon Eurydice. I hesitate to put myself forward as Seaford's Ken Tynan, but the performance I saw in the Komedia Studio Bar on Sunday of multi story's Backward Glance deserves a review.

Multi story are two actors, Gill Nathanson and Bill Buffery, with an international reputation in fringe theatre. They offered last year's Brighton Fringe their Cassandra, and return to Greek myth this year with Backward Glance, a play based on Orpheus's loss of Eurydice and death at the hands of the Maenads. Transposing the story to the present, Orpheus and Eurydice are both writers in a vicious drunken relationship, Eurydice the more successful and famous of the two. After Eurydice's death, stung by a bee, Orpheus, drunk at his laptop, is interrogated by a journalist and a detective, and railed at by his mother-in-law. He cannot explain where he was or what he was doing at the time of his wife's death. The intrusions of police and press make the audience think of our mythologising of the Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath relationship.

Backward Glance both gives new insights into the myth, a story I must have first read or heard as a small boy, and successfully links the two parts of the story, the descent into Hades to bring Eurydice back, and the wandering poet's later death. Gill and Bill offer deep and striking interpretations of the characters. The play runs for two more nights at Komedia, and then goes to Prague: http://www.komedia.co.uk/event.php?id=1232&dst=1210096801

Domain mapping

Regular readers, if there are any, may have noticed some unpleasantness here in recent days. That's not my blog reacting to the dire news of Boris Johnson's election as mayor of London, and his proposals to introduce fagging, flogging and roasting new boys over a slow fire to the capital; rather, I have been trying to implement domain mapping, so this blog shows at my domain of roper.org.uk, which I registered years ago, but have never used to any great extent. It should all be fixed now. If you read me in a newsreader, you probably didn't notice.

2000 Guineas

today's selections, all at Newmarket.
2.45: Harvest Queen
3.25: ink Khaldun
4.00: Gonki

Hollywood Librarian in London

There's a London showing of the Hollywood Librarian, organised by Cilip in London and SLA Europe: http://www.cilip.org.uk/branches/byregion/london/events/Hollywood_Librarian.htm

These metropolitan sophisticates have to be coaxed to the showing by the offer of a champagne draw. We needed no such inducements for the Sussex première in February.

Composer(s) of the week

Too, too ecstatic-making. Richard Addinsell and Noel Coward: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cotw/pip/00ytk/

Sandown, Punchestown and betting slips

Today is what used to be Whitbread Cup day. Some tricky races but I go for the following

Sandown 240: Monet's Garden [will he like the shorter trip...I hope so]
Sandown 320: Lothian Falcon
Sandown 355: Major Cadeaux
Punchestown 455: Silver Jaro

Today's Guardian magazine carries a series of photographs of used betting slips by Stephen Gill, though they aren't on the Guardian website yet.

The death of the telephone enquiry

Today's Times Higher Education carries a report of a telephone survey of twenty university libraries' enquiry services. Repeating a survey carried out by the Polytechnic of North London in 1987, journalists rang up and asked four questions. Alarmingly, only two of the twenty could give the correct boiling point of ethanol, 78.32°C, the others using Wikipedia which at the time of the survey gave a wrong figure. But even worse, several libraries, six in the case of the ethanol question, refused to answer the enquiry at all.

St Pancras

I'm afraid I can't summon up much sympathy for Antonia Fraser and others who are complaining about undergraduates being let into the British Library reading rooms. I use the BL from time to time, but have never failed to find a seat. And some of the criticisms about frappuccinos in the reading rooms are incorrect: coffee is emphatically not allowed in the reading rooms, though anyone can use the cafés. Odd though, that the BL website makes no reference to the debate. I fear they don't understand the 21st century world

I think there is a fundamental principle here: should publicly-funded libraries exclude any citizens? It might help if applicants for readers passes were interviewed and referred elsewhere if the materials they needed to consult were easily available in public or university libraries.