under another sun

To Edgware this morning. Feeling at a low ebb of energy, but hopping from crowded train to crowded train, reading a bit more of  A Memoir of my Former Self by Hilary Mantel. A rich, highly intelligent, and slightly cantankerous personality shows through. I enjoyed her Reith Lectures, contained in this volume. The spit of rain in Seaford got heavier the further north, and was full on pelting by Mill Hill.  To mum's had a cup of tea, then off in the rain to The Waggon and Horses. The pub quiet and post weekendish, but Steve and Paul frowning over a laptop in their corner of the bar.  We ate our usual foods, All day breakfast to share with the birds and foxes for Mum, and chicken shish for me. Home again, and a quiet couple of hours in which I looked at some SF books I had bought in the seventies, I even remembered where I'd bought one of them from. Then had some dinner and watched M*A*S*H, episodes I'd never seen and quite enjoyed. Mum creeping out after dark to feed the fo...

The hour come round at last, Lorraine sloping off to her first ever two-day interview for a real headteacher post. I meanwhile spent the day placidly, went to the gym, worked on The New Idea and prepared salad-based fare for Lorraine to eat when she returned, and generally tried to be supportive. A nice letter from Richard today, along with a copy of a Thomas Tallis CD to complement my Hilary Mantel craze. Cath arrived a little before Lorraine did, armed with a pot of yellow roses. Lorraine getting loads of reinforcement and encouragement from Dawn and Rosie and others too. Then she worked late getting things ready for day two tomorrow. I kept her company working on my stuff upstairs. I really admire Lorraine's capacity to grit her teeth and get on with things. Spoke to Janet who said an owner of a local gallery had visited her open house on the last day and had liked some of Mum's work, fish pictures and cat heads. Could be the start of something good. Also spoke to Mum...

Another beautiful hot day. Hot in the rafters of Old Church Hall, and my brain mainly AWOL during my morning's work, so made off early to the gym and afterwards slunk about not doing very much in the afternoon other than eating ham and salad sandwiches, chatting a little to Sonia who was marvelling at people being in the sea, and saying in her country, Bulgaria, people don't swim much. I watched a documentary  Hitler's Children  about descendants of Nazi wrongdoers. Particularly moving sequences of Rainer Hoess going to Auschwitz where his grandfather was commandant. He was obsessed by one photo of his own father as a little child standing by a gate in a pleasant garden. On the other side of that gate was a death camp, a door into hell as the grandson called it. Visiting that exact spot was appalling. His grandfather could be snapping photographs of his children in paddling pools, driving toy cars and so on, while being meters away from chimneys spewing death. The...

Finished Hilary Mantel's  Wolf Hall , and immediately downloaded its sequel as an audiobook, just released, called Bring up the Bodies . Finding that Hilary Mantel's excellently done Tudor mayhem and wrangling is a pleasant antidote to thinking about about advertising that I am doing for The New Idea. I wonder what the state of advertising was in 1530? A pleasant sunny day though, and warm up in the rafters of the Old Church Hall where I do my scribing. And felt the sun on my head as I mooched gingerly to the gym. I need new gym clothes, as I feel like a tramp. Not that I talk to anyone there particularly. Then tramping into the supermarket to buy the fixin's for nice salad. I made a pretty  tricolore  with fresh basil and mozzarella (so simple), new potatoes with chives and mayonnaise and various other leafy wonders. Lorraine home and exhausted, I fed her with aforementioned salads, then she had half an hour on the sofa and was back at work again till gone ten. I ...