A pessimist, someone explained to me the other day, is just an optimist in possession of the full facts. There’s something pleasingly self-referential about such a gloomy viewpoint. Anyway, those words came back to me this morning, when I got back from my run to find I’d done my 3½ miles in record time. This in turn produced another record: the smiliest breakfast since Arthur Miller poured his post-nuptial cornflakes in the summer of 1956. (Talking of records, a press release from the British Library Association recently mentioned that the book most often stolen from library shelves is, naturally, the Guinness Book of Records. Another self-referential gem.)
My optimistic slice of home-made ciabatta and honey didn’t last long. Neither the bread nor the optimism. Once I’d taken “possession of the full facts”, I realised that my new Garmin Forerunner gadget had stopped prematurely, about half a mile from home. Even now, it continues to stare back at me, unblinkingly. It was another rain-soaked run, but moisture is supposed to be like, er, water off a duck’s back, as it were, to the Garmin. Indeed when I read the spec in the manual on the day I bought it, it led to me musing on yet another difference between the male and female of the species:
“Waterproof to the depth of one metre for 30 minutes”, it says. It struck me when I read these words that a woman would think: “That’s a reassuring feature”, while a man would immediately start looking for a deep tub and a stopwatch to see what would happen if the gadget was immersed for only 29½ minutes. But I digress.
Can it really be the rain that’s done this to my new GPS? Or was it the fumbling and arbitrary button-pushing in the darkness? And has it been murdered, or did it die of natural causes? Is it dead at all? Or merely unconscious? I won’t know this till the battery gives out in about 5 hours from now, when I can try recharging it. In the meantime, I’m in the mood for launching a faintly testy email over the horizon.
Excuse me.
A pessimist, someone explained to me the other day, is just an optimist in possession of the full facts. There’s something pleasingly self-referential about such a gloomy viewpoint. Anyway, those words came back to me this morning, when I got back from my run to find I’d done my 3½ miles in record time. This in turn produced another record: the smiliest breakfast since Arthur Miller poured his post-nuptial cornflakes in the summer of 1956. (Talking of records, a press release from the British Library Association recently mentioned that the book most often stolen from library shelves is, naturally, the Guinness Book of Records. Another self-referential gem.)
My optimistic slice of home-made ciabatta and honey didn’t last long. Neither the bread nor the optimism. Once I’d taken “possession of the full facts”, I realised that my new Garmin Forerunner gadget had stopped prematurely, about half a mile from home. Even now, it continues to stare back at me, unblinkingly. It was another rain-soaked run, but moisture is supposed to be like, er, water off a duck’s back, as it were, to the Garmin. Indeed when I read the spec in the manual on the day I bought it, it led to me musing on yet another difference between the male and female of the species:
“Waterproof to the depth of one metre for 30 minutes”, it says. It struck me when I read these words that a woman would think: “That’s a reassuring feature”, while a man would immediately start looking for a deep tub and a stopwatch to see what would happen if the gadget was immersed for only 29½ minutes. But I digress.
Can it really be the rain that’s done this to my new GPS? Or was it the fumbling and arbitrary button-pushing in the darkness? And has it been murdered, or did it die of natural causes? Is it dead at all? Or merely unconscious? I won’t know this till the battery gives out in about 5 hours from now, when I can try recharging it. In the meantime, I’m in the mood for launching a faintly testy email over the horizon.
Excuse me.
