My name day was marked with a bottle of Pierre’s latest fragrance and two hysterical telephone calls to wish me felicitations on my Santo. The phone calls were only hysterical on my part as they were conducted in Spanish and without the linguistic reinforcement of Toni who was languishing in bed at the time!
The bloody rain has returned and Castelldefels is brightly dull.
I am continuing to read Gombritch’s “A little history of the world” which has been loaned to me by one of my colleagues. This is a “child’s” history and is written with all the inclusiveness of Gombritch’s much more famous “Story of Art.”
This is in every way a popular history and I am beginning to see the assumptions which underpin the ethos behind the story telling.
The most intimidating aspect of the reading is the physical nature of the book itself. My colleague has read it, but the spine is pristine, unbroken, unnatural.
The world is divided into three: those people who read a paperback and don’t break the spine; those people who attempt not to break the spine, but leave the book looking as though it has been read – and those like me who break the spine of the book deliberately to ensure that the pages lie flat.
It seems both impossible and deliberately perverse not to break the spine. Unbroken spines in books make them into clips waiting to close; makes reading into a chore rather than a pleasure. All the time I am reading my colleague’s book I have to remember not to spread out the pages. As I read on and the angle at which I am reading gets ever more sharp the more the temptation there is to snap!
The hotel in Benidorm is now cancelled and so the unlikely triangle of visitation from Castelldefels to Terrassa to Benidorm to Cardiff has now settled down into the much more prosaic Catalonia to Cardiff and back again!
Well, time to start planning Toni’s next sandwich – a real test of my culinary skills!
The bloody rain has returned and Castelldefels is brightly dull.
I am continuing to read Gombritch’s “A little history of the world” which has been loaned to me by one of my colleagues. This is a “child’s” history and is written with all the inclusiveness of Gombritch’s much more famous “Story of Art.”
This is in every way a popular history and I am beginning to see the assumptions which underpin the ethos behind the story telling.
The most intimidating aspect of the reading is the physical nature of the book itself. My colleague has read it, but the spine is pristine, unbroken, unnatural.
The world is divided into three: those people who read a paperback and don’t break the spine; those people who attempt not to break the spine, but leave the book looking as though it has been read – and those like me who break the spine of the book deliberately to ensure that the pages lie flat.
It seems both impossible and deliberately perverse not to break the spine. Unbroken spines in books make them into clips waiting to close; makes reading into a chore rather than a pleasure. All the time I am reading my colleague’s book I have to remember not to spread out the pages. As I read on and the angle at which I am reading gets ever more sharp the more the temptation there is to snap!
The hotel in Benidorm is now cancelled and so the unlikely triangle of visitation from Castelldefels to Terrassa to Benidorm to Cardiff has now settled down into the much more prosaic Catalonia to Cardiff and back again!
Well, time to start planning Toni’s next sandwich – a real test of my culinary skills!
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