First unforeseen expense of the year

The other night I was awakened in the indecently small hours by the burglar alarm, which a momentary power cut seemed to have set off.  I was able to reset the wretched thing quickly, but probably not before it had woken the neighbourhood.  It did the same on Hogmanay when we were out, and our key-holding neighbour had to intervene.  Same again last night while we were out at the cinema.  I'm in the process of organising a repair visit, and an annual service contract.  I know how hacked off we get when other people's alarms malfunction, so don't want to alienate the neighbours still further.  One wonders how much use the damn' things are, really.  When I rang the police about a neighbour's installation a while back, they said they wouldn't act unless we'd seen someone driving off at speed, and suggested we report it to the local insanitary spectre as a noise nuisance.  I suppose the fact that we have an alarm gets us a fraction off the insurance.

We saw the New Year in as usual with friends in the Medway towns, returning home around 02:30.  New Year's Day dawned fine, so the three of us went for a little walk round the older parts of our not very old town.  There's some very fine Victorian residential architecture here and there (the work of Decimus Burton, he of the colonnade screen and triumphal arch at Hyde Park Corner), and a few handsome Georgian terraces.  Martyn had a snooze in the afternoon, and Annie and I took a little stroll round the block, then the three of us went off to the cinema.

Quartet is set in a genteel residential care home for elderly musicians, and stars Pauline Collins, Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay and Billy Connolly, all of whom, I thought, gave terrific performances, with smaller roles for Michael Gambon and Andrew Sachs.  Pauline Collins probably gave the best of them, playing the part of an elderly diva with a very erratic pattern to her dementia.  The background is the preparation for an annual gala concert by the residents to help fund the upkeep of the home, and the chorus, soloists and orchestra were retired professional musicians in real life, as emerged during the credits.  A touch on the sentimental side, but it neatly avoided the mawkish melodrama that could so easily have tempted the writers.  Directed by Dustin Hoffmann, generally (but not uniformly) very well.