The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

Like many people, I fear that in spite of wishing it to be otherwise I am not slow to bemoan the various misfortunes that befall me. So here by way of contrast is a piece of pure pleasantness.

Many of you will, I hope, be familiar with the name Keith Jarrett. Apart from anything else anyone who's read this weblog before should have seen his name up at the top of the page. He is a giant amongst jazz pianists, and he has become something of a symbol for me of the gap between the CD collection I would like to have and the one I can actually justify, given that his beautifully presented albums are always fabulously expensive, never go on sale and are never available at bargain prices on eBay. They hover somewhere in the middle distance, smiling benevolently at me but never falling into my grateful grasp.

Until now.

A woman I work with has just given me The Carnegie Hall Concert, the double solo CD from last year. She gave it to me for no real reason other than doing my job and delivering to her the work for which my company already pay me. She gave it to me with no strings attached, no questions asked and completely out of the blue. This stuff doesn't happen every day.

So join with me in taking time off from realising how lousy everything is, and thinking instead that it is a beautiful world where nice things do happen to good people. And sometimes, evidently, to me as well.

Last year a company came and pitched their presentation software at me. I did explain to them that a) I wasn't in a position to recommend their service to my employers, b) what they were offering was more or less what we do in my department anyway and c) there was no budget for their product, but they insisted on going through the motions. Even though I never expressed any further interest in them, I nevertheless continue to receive occasional pieces of promotion from them. The last one of these was an invitation to join them for a tour of the McLaren racing headquarters, followed by watching a grand prix on a big screen TV. They weren't to know this, but given that I loathe cars and once called motor racing a sport for people who find the second hand ticking round the clock face altogether too exhilarating, it wasn't the most enticing prospect. Now this week I've been offered the chance to spend Sunday afternoon with them for Pimm's and polo at Windsor Great Park. Given that I last took alcohol in 1989, and that the experience of spending three years at Bristol University being looked at down people's noses for my lower middle class, state school upbringing has left me with a deep-rooted aversion to the supposed upper echelons of society, this is another jamboree that appeals to me rather less than it might. I look forward to their next attempt to entice me. A cookery lesson with Gordon Ramsay perhaps?

In a similar vein, a design company once sent me, as a promotional device, a mocked up ransom note of a dog with a gun to its head saying something along the lines of "Use us for your printing or the dog gets it!" I wrote back to them complaining about it - not, as you might think, for its lack of taste, but because the dog was clearly fake and the gun was a water pistol. Not that it would have worked anyway - I doubt there is anyone in the world who would be more pleased than me if there were one less dog in the world.