by rathbone » 09 Jan 2006, 11:36
I was lying in the bath yesterday afternoon, listening to Salutation Road and giving myself a telling off. Here we were, a week in to the new year and no action taken on the resolutions.
I made three resolutions this year:
1. To make sure that the guitar stopped propping up the dining room wall and actually got played.
2. To reactivate Bimbo before it was too late.
3. To get Dorothy’s eyes sorted out.
The first one was easily sorted. I took the thing out of its case this morning, plugged it in and played along with Martin Stephenson and the Daintees (Salutation Road, of course.) How long that will last, we’ll have to wait and see. (The aim is half an hour a day, but that’s ambitious.)
The second was fairly straightforward as well. Bimbo 2007 has begun. When I was at University someone in our year (who shall remain nameless - won’t you Robin?) had the brilliant wheeze of submitting sub-standard work under a pseudonym. Soon all of use were doing it. If you had something which you knew really wasn’t up to scratch, off it went under the name of B. Plenderleith. Amazingly, the tutors caught on to this and would give B. Plenderleith marks for his work. By the time we came to graduate Mr. Plenderleith (now affectionately known as Bimbo) had amassed an impressive body of coursework, but pretty dire marks. After graduation, he developed into a reunion club. Bimbo now consists of almost all of the people in our year (there are some stick in the muds who don’t play along). We get together every five years and take over an hotel for a long weekend and create mayhem, then go off again and become decent citizens until the next time. This has been going on for decades. The next Bimbo weekend, in 2007, will be the fortieth anniversary. At each event someone is nominated to organise the next one. It usually takes ages, not least in finding a new, unsuspecting, hotel each time. This time round it is my mate Jim Jam’s turn to do the honours and I said I’d help, so this morning I sent out 41 e-mails checking everyone’s details and asking for suggestions for (a) the venue and (b) the mayhem.
The third is not so easy. Jim Jam’s wife Dorothy died in 2004. She had been ill for some time with ovarian cancer. My way of dealing with that was to paint a portrait of her as I wanted to remember her, which was laughing on a sunny day up Calton Hill. So off I went, painting away. Every time Jim Jam comes round to our house, he takes a look and says yeah, that’s okay, or no, that doesn’t look right. This has been going on for a year now and the only bits that haven’t got his seal of approval are her eyes. Maybe by the end of February?.......
I have nothing to say and I'm going to say it.