under another sun

Another recovery day, I am - touch wood - inching back towards health and every day without a flare up is good. Small amounts of work done but little physical or mental energy. Consequently little to report other than receiving the score for A Return to Sarnia by Chiara Beebe, a very accomplished 22 year old born in Guernsey. She has used my poem A Return for what looks to be, with my rudimentary score reading skills, a rather beautiful piece that also quotes the song Sarnia Cherie. The song is going to be performed in the Guernsey Sinfonietta's Terra Nova concert of modern and new music on, I think, August 6th. This of course made me feel quite cheery - with the prospect of whipping over to Guernsey to see it, thrown in for good measure. It will be good to meet Chiara too, who seems very switched on and sorted and, all being well, to see the bronzed and Italianate Flemings. Finished The sense of an ending by Julian Barnes. I found it very enjoyable, despite its contrivances...

Able to get on with admin and a bit of writing quite well this morning. Not in pain any more, but wrung out after a month of assorted ailments. Able to walk to the post office, buy a bag of cherries and so on. (Cherries are my friends apparently.) Still sleeping loads. This year's Summer Suck really is going for it. Thanking my lucky stars I do not have to commute to London at the moment. Listening to a Julian Barnes book at the moment, called The Sense of an Ending . A quietly wonderful book. Concise but packed with interesting ideas about memory, loss and life. Sparking lots of things in my head, including not so cheerfully memories of a friend I had lived with at university, who had died some years ago. Lorraine home briefly and we walked through the meadowy flowers in the park for ten minutes, before she went out for a salad supper with the governors of the school she was a governor at till recently. She missed perhaps the most astonishing game of football in world cup hist...