under another sun

A calm start with a short meditation from my Plum Village App.  Recommended to Lorraine by Sian, and is the best one of its kind I've encountered, free and full of lovely meditations that I've only just started working through. The morning spent completing the first draft of a website about parasites. At lunchtime I sent it to  mes amis and made off to the gym. Learning about Resucsi Anne and L'Inconnue , which was mentioned in a horror podcast. Fascinating. Apparently the face used in resuscitation mannequins is that of an unknown girl fished out of the Seine in the 19th Century. Although the BBC article I have linked to, questions just how preserved the face looks. Home again, and I did some admin, wrote a review of Keyhole  (a collection of short stories I'd highly recommend), arranged to meet Helen to discuss the Centaur, and spoke to Mum who had been out in London. Watched part one of a BBC documentary series about Thatcher. Funny to see times you clearly ...

Bit of a ditto day. Mostly the same as yesterday, including the beetroot. Spoke to Mum and Mas at lunch, and in the evening a had long chat with Bob, stuck in a hotel bar in Peterborough. At work coming to the end of the big job I have been working on. Quite nice to be signing off bits of artwork at last. Tomorrow I am covering for Pat by popping into a recording studio to oversee a voiceover recording for a corporate video. Margaret Thatcher's funeral today. Even up around Tavistock Square soldiers in evidence, watching bits of it on my screen at work. One thing about this country is that we do pomp and circumstance quite well. Home reading The End of the Party , which is quite soap like. It is not the normal sort of book I read, which may be why I am enjoying it so much. Learned a few things today, including about asemic writing , which is somewhere between abstraction and writing. It is writing that is deliberately done, but not understandable by anyone. A bit like the gra...

Bleary morning. Dragging myself unwillingly to work. Left my flask of tea on the side so as the dire First Capital Connect trains have nothing onboard drank my first cup of tea at an unprecedented two and a half hours after getting up. A poor experience. Reading an MS by Mark Hill, a writer who I once worked with, who is living Portugal. Interesting book about him leaving London in the midst of a mid life crisis, with a broken heart and a drink problem, and his gradual recovery living in a small village in Portugal. A series of small things got my day off to a slightly askew start: being shouted at not to use a lift I was walking into because it was for a paramedic in the office reception; an email from the people who are managing my property saying that someone had crowbarred the door knocker from my door in the Twitten and what was I going to do about it. And an irritating discussion with unhelpful colleagues: a collection of small Pooterish peeves.  In a lull, I happened...

Memories of Maggie Mental clearout as I took a lunchtime stroll down the river, and made a few decisions about future directions, and to get back on track with my own plans and schemes. Couple of bracing notes from Randolph today. Looking forward to seeing him again and putting the world to rights. He was saying that his current thinking is that he traces all that's wrong with, say, Opera and is that art is being ruined by intellect. He told me about going to a horribly spiky modern Opera at Glyndebourne and longing for the parole of intermission "and then everybody I encountered if they were ENJOYING it - a small straw poll, no doubt - but did not meet A SINGLE PERSON who said they were." More delays on the trains going home tonight. Home, and I watched a drama about Margaret Thatcher's last days in power, which had a great central performance by the slightly too gorgeous Lindsay Duncan. Much as I detested Thatcher, this showed nicely the loathsome lickspittles that ...