Today this essential part of the procedure was completed. I have to admit that I was fully clothed but I was able to lean back in my chair and allow my face to be bathed in the refulgent vitamin D giving rays.
It wasn’t for a particularly long time before the scattered rags of cloud caught up with the sunshine and made even sitting fully clothed outside less than a good idea; but it was for a time and that satisfies me. And there are two more days for the sunshine to do its health giving work!
I have not been able to stay away from my telephone and have therefore read an inordinate number of pulp science fiction short stories. I have also been able, for the sake of my literary credibility, to find much in them which in terms of narrative, social comment and sheer style worthy of recognition.
To be fair I can feel the old tug of the drug-like qualities of sci-fi dragging me under and I have therefore escaped from the electronic thrall of the potency of cheap literature and start looking at the books that I bought in Luton before boarding the flight back to Spain.
The book that I have almost finished is “The Book of the Dead” by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. I bought this in spite of the quoted recommendation of the ubiquitous Stephen Fry whose comment was “Dead good.”
This is a book about dead people taking in the famous like Florence Nightingale and Genghis Khan to the reasonably obscure like George Psalmanazar and Archibald Belaney.
This is a type of book where the reading is so ridiculously easy and jolly that you feel mildly guilty reading it in the firm solidity of an armchair at home rather than in the plastic discomfort of an viciously uncomfortable aeroplane seat or on the gritty discomfort of a beach.
As the writing is littered with what the authors of “1066 and all that” call real facts it appeals to my rag-bag mind and I greedily sweep up unconsidered trifles like the “fact” that it was Sir Joshua Reynolds looking at the painting through layers of varnish who termed Rembrandt’s painting “The Night Watch” – though I am not convinced that I believe it.
This is a book which makes me wonder if I should have heard of Fernando Pessoa or have known more about Nikola Tesla. Did I know that Oliver Cromwell was abducted by a monkey while a baby or that Frida Kahlo never went to the district in Mexico where those dresses she wore came from?
As always in book like this that have too friendly a writing style I begin think that this is like one of those books by Borges where the more detail and footnotes there are then the less likely it is to be true!
Any book that links together Leonardo da Vinci, Sigmund Freud, Isaac Newton, Oliver Heaviside, Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Hans Christian Andersen and Salvador Dalí in one chapter cannot be all bad! Well worth a read!
In the real world today is a bank holiday and, horror of horrors it has brought the scumbag next door neighbours back to their usually vacant house. At the moment there is just much going up and going down staircases with the occasional squawk or some type of rat-like dog; but if they are in residence then the screaming at adolescent girls can only be hours away! On the other side the baying, yapping and dry barking of the canine canaille kept by our bollard wrecking neighbour keeps up its wearisome punctuation day and night.
Tomorrow I assume that the shops will be open again and the menu del dia back to its non fiesta price. Today I had a Japanese meal which, while very good and more than substantial, was almost double the price which one pays on a normal Monday. Well, I suppose that is keeping things going: it is pleasant to think that one is bolstering the European economy and not just being a poor sucker in the profiteering clutches of grasping capitalists.
Back to my reading.
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