Rain! The
fact that the word has an exclamation mark after it shows how rare it is,
hindering me from taking my daily earlyish morning bike ride. I mean, I am not fanatical about it and I
have discovered that my lightweight coat is now (after lockdown girth-gain)
somewhat snug to the point of constriction.
This means that my ‘small enough to be compressed to the size of a
cricket ball’ coat is now not so useful and I will have to look around though
my weather-wear to find something more suitable to carry with me on the bike as
an emergency covering to cope with inclement weather.
The
rain held off for almost all of my ride, and even towards the end the rain was ‘only
in the wind’ and I did not need to put on the jacket that I had packed into a small
backpack. The inclement weather
encouraged most people to stay at home and so my ride was rather more spacious
than usual and a damn sight more pleasant.
As
Catalan weather is not quite as spiteful as British weather, the rain did not
really develop into something more damp and we even had some sunshine, though I
was too tardy to take much advantage of it.
The cultural event of the day was the National
Theatre free play from the Donmar Theatre of Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston. Again it was one of those filmed performances
that you really wanted to experience in the theatre rather than on the screen,
but it was a moving experience, and I am glad and grateful that I have had the opportunity
to see it.
I think
of Coriolanus in the same way that I think about Madame Bovary:
there is no one in the play or novel whom I really like, but I very much enjoy
the moral dilemmas and quandaries that both throw up in their essentially
chaotic lives.
The
production of Coriolanus was complicated by the fact that Hiddleston has
something of a mesmeric stage presence and, in spite of what he was saying it
was almost impossible not to feel for him.
Both Coriolanus and Madame Bovary are both characters whose impossibly complicated
lives seem to insist on death as the only reasonable solution to their situations!
I have now read (via Kindle) the second of Tom
Holt’s novels using the characters created by EF Benson. I think that I read it too soon after my
re-reading of the first, with the result that the second, Lucia Triumphant,
seems a little formulaic and self-indulgently picaresque – though, to be fair,
that is quite like the style of the originals.
There were one or two points of real pleasure in the elegance of the
writing and the cleverness of the situations engineered, but it did not satisfy
as much as the first, possibly because the setting in the Second World War gave
a more convincing overarching backdrop.
Nevertheless, worth reading. And indeed,
worth buying in Kindle.
After
talking to Irene, I have also downloaded at her suggestion a book of short
stories by John Grisham called Ford County which I look forward to
reading tomorrow.
The extension of the lockdown seems to be a
formality here in Spain. We seem to be
heading for the next level in our lockdown by the weekend and who knows, it
might even be possible to swim in the sea next week.
We take
our pleasures as we are allowed to find them.
