Half a lost weekend

Friday ended with Suzanne and I enjoying a chat on the Third Floor interspersed with glasses of wine and nice things to eat.  The nice things to eat continued on Saturday when Toni, his mum and I went to our local and, for the first time for a long time I had poussin.  It was delicious, although Toni was contemptuous of the English word for a small chicken and intimated that it may have had its origins in France.  Which it did of course.

After lunch we went straight to a DIY store to get the bits and pieces for The Lamp.

The Lamp has been in construction for some time and comprises two glass cylinders, one inside the other, with the space between them being filled by sea glass.  The centre cylinder has a colour-changing bulb and it is held in place by a lid constructed by Toni and when turned on illuminates the sea glass in a very fetching way.  The sea glass (which I am reliably informed dates from the 60s!) is usually in white or green with some brown and it takes a hell of a lot to fill up the space on The Lamp.  We reckon that it will take the rest of this year to get sufficient pieces of complete this work of art!

In school on Friday John (via Julie) loaned me “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga which apparently won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.  On the strength of reading it I agree with the accusation that the Booker Prize is becoming dumbed down.  Don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it didn’t have very much in the form of depth to keep me thinking.

I thought it was more on a par with Slumdog Millionaire in its presentation of a radically different culture which is seemingly motivated by corruption.  I liked the idea of a murderer telling the story and I thought the direction of his writing to the Chinese Premier was also an acute and interesting detail given the development of the major countries of the Third World.  The detail in the book was interesting, but I thought it was essentially shallow.  But a good read.

Saturday night and most of Sunday was not quite so pleasurable as I had a recurrence of my illness from last Sunday: feeling cold and generally unwell.  This is not the sort of thing that I expect, especially as I have spent most of Sunday in bed.

The Family has been here since lunchtime and I have been very much the host in absentia.  I made one abortive attempt to get up at about 3 in the afternoon and lapsed back into bed within an hour.  I have finally come to some sort of wellness in the evening and I have managed to force down a couple of sandwiches made by Toni’s mum’s fair hand.  After a day of not eating, they tasted delicious.

Tomorrow seems to be dominated by hospitals as Toni goes back for a check in the evening and at the same time he is waiting for his physio to start at a health centre in town.

All this and teaching too!