63. Chaos has driven me to retail therapy...

...well, at least to the local second-hand bookshop. 12 books in about as many minutes! More of them in a mo.

But first, the chaos. The builders have knocked through from the kit room into the hall - dust everywhere despite several walls of plastic. So many walls of plastic and sheets that going up and down the stairs has become a time-consuming adventure (perhaps similar to negotiating a Turkish massage-parlour boudoir). It has also necessitated me to make a packed lunch in my own house!



I'm trying to keep the builders morale up - entertainment this week has included me taking down the washing from the whirlygig whilst wearing a pair of gloves. My explanation is that I was mowing the grass, it started to rain, and I did not want to get the white-wash grassy.

All of this chaos and mayhem has driven me to ice-cream with everything, and a trip to the local bookshop - how about this for a fab book list:-

Amsterdam (McEwan - just about completing my collection)
The Bridge - Iain Banks
Freedom (& Corrections) - Franzen
2 x William Boyd (thanks Mum)
On The Beach (Shute - thanks Nick & Sals)
French Lieutenant's Woman (almost completing my Fowles collection!)
The Rat - Gunter Grass (spur of the moment)
Elegance of the Hedgehog (in the spirit of the Aussie man who after buying a jeep-load of beer, then added a bottle of sherry for his missus, the result being the wheel fell off the jeep and him commenting 'overdid it on the sherry')
Snakes and Ladders (ditto)
Bitter Fruit (ditto)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

285. Been thinking about my last blog . . .

Image
. . . even if no-one else has. One of the implications of much of an apple's goodness (minerals and vitamins) being in its seeds is that to benefit they have to be eaten. And not just eaten but chewed up as apple seeds tend simply to be passed. I then remembered something about apple pips containing cyanide. I began to look into all this . . . There are hundreds and hundreds of web snippets on the benefits of eating apples, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that. But quite difficult to shore it up with trusted sources. A medium-sized apple weighs 150g - 200g and contains half that number of calories. 80% is water, 10% is carbohydrate, 0.5% protein and 4% minerals and vitamins. Half the minerals and vitamins and fibre are in the peel and the core. Apple pips contain amygdalin which can release cyanide when coming contact with digestive enzymes. According to the http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/contact-us/about-us/  (Cambridge University group) about
Read more

319. We've got a dog!

Image
I know, I know . . . but I've kind of always wanted one . . . . . . from when I was very young, before I joined the Job, when I was thinking about joining the Job. I had a dream (I must have been 13 or 14, and I had lots of posters of dogs on my bedroom walls) about becoming a bearded-batchelor police dog-handler. In my dream I called the dog Wolfram . And guess what? We've called our dog  Wolfram ! He's so cute. He is, of course, an Alsatian and a good guard-dog. Which will be good because this is a big place and Sarah's away a lot. (The door-bell went off in the middle of the night last week, no-one there, turned out it was half-pressed in, but it didn't half freak me out.) Anyway, Wolfram is a new type of dog. Specially bred for people like me. He's a veggie. Eats like a horse of course, but and this is the point, he eats just like a horse. CRUCIALLY, he shits like a horse too. So, no smelly piles all around the garden but just the sweet
Read more

73. Stuck for something to read?

Try a William Boyd novel. They hook you from the start, have interesting and original plots and are not overly long. What's more there are lots of them, and relatively easy to find in second-hand bookshops. Perfect for a holiday read, if you are stuck on a difficult novel or just want something a bit different. His books sometimes feel like he has written them with the aid of a special book-kaleidoscope: twist it again, 10 bizarre plot-lines fall out and Boyd glues them together in 300 pages. Try one!
Read more