I spent Saturday catching up – sending emails, confirming work, and catching up most of all with the magazine of which I am an editor and which had some lingering matters I’d been putting off in the general swirl of work. Otherwise, a fairly uninteresting day, with one great tragedy: my favourite cake shop no […]
All clear
Our tests were all clear, hurrah. The GF had had a suspicious throat and wooziness for a few days which had us worried and isolating, but happily all seems to be fine. Such is a cold or allergy in the time of a pandemic, one worries about things that otherwise would go unnoticed. I have […]
Lost days
A few lost days as work has kicked up a couple of gears and I’m forever behind. I read The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin – technically re-read it, but didn’t remember a word of it. Very enjoyable, and starts with a very good metaphor about coming from sleep to wakefulness. After some quality […]
A curious fact
I have just learned that one of JRR Tolkien’s first illustrators for The Lord of the Rings was someone by the name of Ingahild Grathmer, an illustrator better known under her real name, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
Estrangement
I read the first part of Camus’s L’Étranger before going to bed last night and it made for strange dreams. The first was one which felt joyful: the GF, my siblings and I were visiting Paris and the Seine ran through a deep forested ravine, and the metro system was a series of small planes […]
Prince’s Islands
ter
Far better
I started reading The Time Regulation Institute a couple of days ago, and as always my habit of going from lowly genre to quality literature pays off. It is such a pleasure to read something of quality, and later it will be a pleasure to read something with an entirely different appeal. This is a […]
Nothing changes
A good article in the LRB about working class Victorian wives and husbands. Reminds me of the endless stories told by our female servants when I was growing up. Nothing changes, not across centuries or continents. I also reverted briefly to my teenage and read a book, A Brightness Long Ago, by Guy Gavriel Kay, […]
Grumble
Seriously annoyed that Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light was not shortlisted for the Booker. Made significantly worse by the fact that all but one of the shortlisted authors are American or joint-US. I was amongst those who were genuinely upset when the Booker opened up to the US, fearing that it would swamped by […]
To the palace
Sunday was at Topkapi. As before, easy to get to, a simple tram ride across the Golden Horn, to the domes and towers we see every day from our window. I had thought it might be relatively empty but it really wasn’t, though most of the other visitors were Turks, Iranis, South Asians, etc. Turkey […]