The answer is two.

One to remove the front bumper, the second to unbolt the headlamp unit, take it out and remove the old bulb. Then replacing the new bulb is a doddle. All you have to do then is rebolt the headlamp, ensuring it is accurately aligned, and replace the front bumper. Oh — I forgot, you have to take the front wheel off to do this.

Total labour time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Labour cost: £105.00
D2R Headlamp bulb: £95.00
Total: £200.00
VAT @ 17.5%: £35.00
TOTAL £235.00

to change one lightbulb.

Pay up!

Here’s a status update on my last post, Quite A Day.

I came up to London from Harlech last night to check on the progress of my invalids. Yvonne has a small avulsion fracture of the calcaneum bone near to the articulating surface with the cuboid bone. She will be in plaster for four to six weeks, and gets a new, all solid cast on Monday. This is the temporary (expandable, to allow the bruise to swell) cast:

Milo swallowed a large pebble, which lodged in his intestinal tract. He was operated on within hours, and later made such a fuss that he was sent home the same evening. He thinks he’s back to normal. He goes back to the vet on Tuesday to have his staples removed. Here’s what a Brazilian Golden Retriever looks like, together with his staples (and also unfortunately his pintle, of which he’s inordinately fond):

So they’re both on the mend. What a relief. The NHS has covered everything for Yvonne, but Milo chose to go private. Luckily we took out insurance for him and they have just confirmed they will cover our vets’ bill. Phew.

First of all, we must welcome Benjamin Robert Lloyd Ellis, who arrived here on July 13th at 22:02. Congratulations to Jane, David and big brother Nathaniel!

All seemed pretty good yesterday. Von had made an interesting shopping list for goodies for my birthday today. Milo was subdued and a little off colour, but seemed relatively OK. Von ran downstairs to let the electricity man in to read the meter, spun round at the bottom of the stairs and collapsed in agony. The loud crack from her foot did not herald good news. I was piling ice onto her ankle when my sister Jo rang. “Get her to an X-ray at once,” ordered Jo. She’s a physio and she knows these things.

We drove to the Whittington and she was admitted into A&E, together with a felon handcuffed to a police officer and a madman staring at his tattoos and constantly shouting at himself. It’s a gritty city.

I’d gone home to await her call. Four hours later, by 7pm, I was getting anxious. I checked my phone — and found I’d switched it off in the morning to stop it downloading another 200 emails, and forgotten to turn it on again. And I’d switched the office phones over to Moneypenny, our secretarial service. Von had been calling me since 5:15, when she was let out. I got her voicemail message and rang her immediately, but she was already in the taxi coming home. She was angry and upset but she didn’t want to spoil my birthday.

Plaster up to the knee (left leg) and two crutches. She was not a happy bunny. I prepared a fish soup following instructions shouted through the kitchen hatch. It was delicious.

We wrapped the plaster in clingfilm so she could turn over in bed more easily, and to stop it messing the sheets as it’s a hard/soft plaster (because she has a bruise like a balloon) and it was still slightly damp.

I got up to make tea in the morning and the hall floor was awash with Milo’s vomit. He looked terrible, my effervescent pup who usually does somersaults at the sight of food. A Bonio held no interest for him. He would not eat. Off to the vet.

The vet has just called. Milo had an X-ray, and a blockage was found in his intestine. General anaesthetic, on to the slab, cut him open and inside the intestine was a large stone, too big to be passed. Stone removed, dog sewn back up, coming round from anaesthetic, all seems OK, job done. We get him back on Monday. I shudder to think of what the bill will be, although we do have some limited form of pet insurance.

Whereas I dropped Von off at the hospital at 3:00 and if I’d had my phone on (doh!) I could have picked her up at 5:15, fully X-rayed, diagnosed, painkilled, plastered, given a pair of new crutches and a pile of drugs. All paid for by the NHS. Quick, efficient and polite. Don’t knock it too much. The alternative is not worth considering.

So here we are. Von lying on a sofa with plastered foot in the air, dog lying on marble slab in alien vet office, and me celebrating my birthday with an Apple  Inc product. Happy Birthday To Me!

Milo and Von in fitter days on Harlech Beach:

OK, the days are drawing in, and fast falls the eventide.

Why am I thinking this way? Because last week a lady offered me her seat on the bus.

It won’t be long now.

So in a spirit of closure, I offer this short list of the top ten books I’ve enjoyed through my all too short life (the Bible and Shakespeare are included by default). They’re listed alphabetically by author, because rankings are invidious. If I’m spared, I’ll follow this up with films and records.

The Peregrine, by J A Baker

Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll

Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes

Follies & Grottoes, by Barbara Jones

The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Five Children and It, by E Nesbit

Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust (trans. Scott-Moncrieff)

Other Men’s Flowers, by A P Wavell

Stoner, by John Williams

I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to painting. I certainly don’t dismiss modern or abstract art, but I usually find more to enjoy in figurative painting. And I’m a sucker for plain simple craftsmanship; the miraculous ability to capture a glint of light with a casual stroke of the brush, a fold in a satin cloth. It must be innate. I’m sure it can’t be taught.

I play the guitar. I’m not very good, but I do know all five chords. Recently I’ve been practising Amos Garrett’s sublime guitar solo, one of the finest ever created, on Maria Muldaur’s “Midnight At The Oasis.” And now, after ten years or so, I can reproduce it pretty accurately. It sounds similar. You can tell what it is. But what I could never do in a million years is conjure up that glorious waterfall of notes by myself. Amos Garrett fleshed out David Nichtern’s skeleton chords to create a beauty worthy of John Singer Sargent. My use of the same material comes out more like Frankenstein’s monster. I can copy, but I can’t create — musically, at least.

This is all getting somewhere, and it leads to a line. It’s a simple, brief, slightly kinked monoline, and it delineates the backbone of a cow.  At the John Singer Sargent exhibition “Sargent and The Sea” at the Royal Academy, the great European portrait painter (of American parentage) shows a different side of his genius — his affection for the sea. The small exhibition ranges from large oils as seen below, to tiny dashed off pencil sketches. One sticks in my mind, and I’d show it to you if I could. On a small scrap of paper torn from a notebook, Sargent rapidly sketched a herd of cattle in the hold of a ship, seen from above.

A simple stroke of the pencil — not studied, just drawn — marks the backbone of one cow. Neck slightly twisted, this one cow is angled a fraction away from her sisters. This simple line of pencil, barely an inch, is something I could never hope to emulate. Sargent saw it and recorded it, probably without thinking. It was just what he did. There’s no rubbing out and repeated attempts, there it is. A bovine stroke of genius.

Genius is not a description lightly bestowed, but I think John Singer Sargent merits it. His portraits of women, for which he was most famous, are simply breathtaking. An exhibition of his work a few years back was advertised something like this:

TWO STEPS TO LOOKING BEAUTIFUL
1. Get your portrait painted by John Singer Sargent
2. That’s it.

But for one so famous at conveying the human face and form, our hero sometimes seems to falter at this exhibition. Take this “Neapolitan Children Bathing”, painted in 1879 when Sargent was 23. You can feel the heat, you just know the languid carelessness of the two boys lying on the sand, the arm flung over to shield the eyes is perfectly observed. And the attitude of the toddler staring in bewilderment at the painter is so true to life.

But what happened to the toddler’s face? Is it unfinished? Was the child deformed in some way? It is a dreadful mess, especially from such a gifted portraitist as Sargent.  I am baffled. The rest of the scene is faultless. I love the pigs’ bladders in use as waterwings. But that face! Even Homer nods.

I cannot find any fault with “En Route pour la pêche” from the previous year. For me this is a masterpiece. Everything about it works for me, especially the contre-jour lighting and the reflections in the puddles. Perhaps the startling thing is the freshness and vivacity of the original, utterly missing in this drab digital reproduction. The painting sings. The whites are whiter, the blues bluer, the summer day is eternal. It is fabulous.

You can see what the original looks like from this reproduction. Much like you could spot that the thing Gwyn was playing was Amos Garrett’s solo from “Midnight At The Oasis.”

Sargent and the Sea
10 July 2010 to 26 September 2010

John Singer Sargent
Neapolitan Children Bathing, 1879
Oil on canvas
16.8 x 41.1 cm
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1955.852

John Singer Sargent
En Route pour la pêche (Setting Out to Fish), 1878
Oil on canvas
78.8 x 122.8 cm
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund 17.2

This exhibition has been organised by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in cooperation with the Royal Academy of Arts.

Well done Rafa Nadal. But spare a thought for poor Ramon Delgado of Paraguay.
He was beaten by Gabashvili,
… who was beaten by Kohlschreiber
… who was beaten by Roddick
… who was beaten by Lu
… who was beaten by Djokovic
… who was beaten by Berdych
… who was beaten by Nadal
So effectively Delgado came bottom of the pile.

I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me. There should be an award.

Along with other countries, Great Britain has a long tradition of honouring foreigners who have achieved great things.
I would like to propose that the American John Isner and the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut each be awarded an honorary MBE for services to tennis.
Their world record-breaking, marathon endurance tennis match captivated a planet otherwise obsessed with the foootball World Cup. It was gripping, wonderful tennis, and we ran out of superlatives long before the end. Although Isner won, both players will go down in history as winners.
It was a great gesture by Wimbledon to give both players awards; now I think the country should recognise them. I’m starrting a group on Facebook — please sign up to it.

I love this show. I go every year, and it’s always a treat — there’s much to admire, much to despise, much to marvel at. There are over 1,000 works of art from the grandest of Royal Academicians to the humblest of students.

But before you see the few images that caught my eye, here’s my annual UNTITLED count. Last year 18 out of the 1,266 works on display had the caption UNTITLED. What is it about artists and / or their agents? If you can’t think of a title for what you’re doing, why are you doing it?

My rant clearly shook up the artistic community because out of 1,267 pieces this year, 33 of them were captioned UNTITLED.

Hmmm. That’s a 183% increase in unimaginativity. I am compelled to take this as a personal affront.

Here chosen at random, and with no reference to scale, are four works titled UNTITLED. When I finally get on the Hanging Committee, its name is going to take on a whole new meaning.

The sleb artist Tracy Emin has four works on display and they’re all crap. I guess it’s a matter of taste.

Bile to one side, many pieces caught my eye, and here are just a few of them.

Ken Howard’s paintings of Venice capture the moods of La Serenissima like few since Canaletto, but here’s a non-Venetian portrait of DORA, SUMMER INTERIOR, CORNWALL:

The Architectural gallery is always a delight, and here are two pieces that stood out for me:

The COWLEY ST LAURENCE SCHOOL, a Church of England primary school in Hillingdon, north-west London, appears to have a façade made out of Lego bricks, 1,063,800 of them apparently, created by WHAT_architecture. This is a detail of it.

And this won, won wonderful self-explanatory chess set by Mobile Studio is titled STYLE WARS: (CHESS SET) MODERNISTS VERSUS TRADITIONALISTS. The Gherkin King! I want it! but I don’t have £1,600. And I’m not very good at chess (though I once beat a fomer Mayor of Paris):

I’m not David Hockney’s biggest fan, but I do admire his protest against the totalitarian smoking ban, and I adored his mighty THE TWENTY-FIVE BIG TREES BETWEEN BRIDLINGTON SCHOOL AND MORRISON’S SUPERMARKET ON BESSINGBY ROAD, IN THE SEMI-EGYPTIAN STYLE, PHOTOGRAPHED 19TH AUGUST 2009.

I believe a measure of the importance of art for poor people like me is: can I live with it? So size has to become a consideration. Not many of us possess vast empty walls for hanging space, or the square footage needed for a Richard Serra installation. I’ve always liked the Small Weston Room because it fills the needs of the ordinary person — small paintings on a human perspective. I loved Lance Fennell’s tiny HEADLIGHTS NEAR PADBURY, simply because I could live with it and it would inspire the imagination to create endless stories. This is almost life size:

Not illustrated is David Mach’s SILVER STREAK, a gigantic gorilla made out of coat hangers — an amazing sight — but here is a small snip from his huge collage BABEL TOWERS. Where are these towers? They are incredibly familiar, but I can’t place them. Please tell me!

Go and see the show. It’s one of the highlights of the summer.

A note on the Icelandair website announces, a little smugly:

Volcanoes help define Iceland and hold a special place in the heart of Icelandair since our aircraft are named after famous Iceland volcanoes like Hekla and Katla.

Everyone’s so full of Eyjafjallajokul nowadays that poor old Hecla (as we Brits spell it) is all but forgotten, except in my recent post here. It used to be up there in the Volcano Hall of Fame with Etna and Vesuvius, and the Royal Navy has even named seven warships after it, but in recent weeks it has been overshadowed by the overlong (to English tongues) Eyjafjallajokul.

If they’d told us it was Hecla, we’d have believed them, wouldn’t we? And we can pronounce that one.

But given that their damn volcano threw European travel into chaos for a month and wrecked the London Book Fair, among other sacred events, it’s a bit steep of the Icelanders to name their aeroplanes after volcanoes, nej?

I’m not a coffee snob, I’ll drink almost anything, like Stieg Larsson, but there’s no doubt that real coffee made with a decent machine is immeasurably superior to instant coffee.

But in a way, I quite like a mug of instant coffee from time to time, as long as everyone (including me) recognises the fact that it is a completely separate drink. There are times when only proper coffee will do. There are times when the real coffee ritual is too protracted and all I want or need is a coffee-related beverage, however distant.

Von won’t touch it. All instant coffee is dismissed as a “nasty cup of coffee”. I go to boil the kettle after lunch, and she asks “Having a nasty cup of coffee then?”

Basic instant coffee is too revolting even for me. Kenco Gold is bearable, but you have to use two spoonfuls. You have to use two spoonfuls (spoonsful??) for any instant coffee anyway. But the other day I saw an exciting range of jars in the supermarket so I thought I’d give them a go — Nescafé Alta Rica, Cap Colombie and Espresso. I was looking forward to trying them out. Could these be the first instants to resemble proper coffee?

Then I saw this ad in the paper yesterday:

It looks like I’ll have to wait a while before carrying out the taste comparison test. It also looks like I wasn’t the only punter to be seduced by the cool, sophisticated packaging. I’ve been trying the helpline since 08:30 and it’s permanently engaged. I don’t want to die an agonising death with ground glass lacerating my intestines; I can get that on Holby City.

So it’s back to real coffee, made with my trusty Pavoni. I bought it in Lucca, Tuscany in 1983 and I have used it every day since. Admittedly every part except the boiler has had to be replaced, as it was made at the peak of Italian metallurgical brilliance (put your ear close enough and you can listen to it rusting away by itself) but it does make a mean cup of coffee.

All I want is a proper cup of coffee
Made in a proper copper coffee pot
I don’t want a lot
But I want a cup of coffee from a proper coffee pot
Tin coffee pots
Iron coffee pots
They’re no good to me
If I can’t have a proper cup of coffee from a proper copper coffee pot I’ll have a cuppa tea.