Quatermass and the Pit

            On Sunday morning I adjusted my translation of “A la pêche des coeurs" (To the Fishing Hole for Hearts) by Boris Vian. I still have a bit more to do before publishing it on my blog.

            I ran through “Lucette et Lucie” by Serge Gainsbourg in English and then uploaded it to Christian's Translations for editing. 

            In the late morning, for the first time in months I returned to my kitchen floor scrubbing project. I cleaned seven boards about a metre in length from the credenza back towards the stove. It’ll take about for more sessions to get to the stove and then I think I’ll have to spend some time washing all the shelves above the stove and adding one more shelf at the top, since I have the board and the brackets and there are slots for another shelf a logical distance above the others so that they would all be an equal space apart. 

            For lunch I had the last of my Triscuits with some onion cheddar and my last bran muffin. 

            In the afternoon I went for my first bike ride in three months. I noticed on Brock Avenue that the cones and “Quiet Street” signs have been taken down. I wondered how long ago that happened. Later I looked it up and saw that the program was planned all along to go from May to October and then there is supposed to be a Report on it coming out in January. 

            I had first thought that I would ride all the way to Yonge Street but I had left my place at 16:00 and it was already dimming overhead, especially since it was cloudy. I had brought along three library books from OISE which I’d planned on dropping off there but I decided to go down St George and slip them into the slot at Robarts, since it’s all the U of T libraries are okay for drop offs. I’d been taking those French grammar books out for years but I’ve now decided I'm only interested in learning French from listening, reading and translating rather than from doing exercises. It was too much of a hassle keeping on renewing those books every six weeks. I was relieved when I was rid of them. 

            It was almost dark when I got home just before 17:00. It was nice to get some exercise. 

            I worked on looking at one of the possible terms from my upcoming test. "Abjection" doesn’t seem to mean what Professor Kamboureli says it means.

            I had a fried egg and a piece of baguette with a beer while watching part four of Quatermass and the Pit.

            The giant insect creatures with three legs that are found in the front of the strange cylindrical hull buried under Hobbes Lane are decaying quickly. Roney and Barbara rush to gather their body parts to preserve at the museum. Quatermass thinks that they had been preserved in the chamber for five million years but when it was exposed to the atmosphere the decaying began. He speculates further that the creatures are Martians from five million years ago, that they experimented on the ape creatures of Earth, increasing their intelligence and causing them to develop into mankind. When he and Colonel Breen are called to the war office they find his theory too fantastic. Breen offers an alternative theory that this was just an elaborate hoax designed by the Germans in 1944. That the hull is merely the remains of a V2 rocket and the creatures are fakes made from sewed together animals like the fake mermaids presented at fairs. The minister likes that theory and declares the emergency over. The army is ordered to clear the site, but when Sladden the drill operator stays behind to gather his equipment, suddenly the hull begins to shake and anything loose begins to fly around. He runs away in a panic but everywhere he goes objects start to fly around him. When he collapses on the ground the earth begins to ripple underneath him.