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Back after three days in Blighty. You know you've arrived in Pound Land within minutes of entering the service station: Because You've Earned It sloganed above a cup of coffee. Buy a newspaper and the immediate demand whether you want a chocolate bar with that? No. Why? & several other questions. I wince to think of the training sessions in which employees are drilled through their responses.
I realise the way to counter such tactics is to say - while placing the objects to be bought on the counter - "Just these two" in a firm I've made up my mind voice.
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Having packed the Duncan H.D. Book & Lisa's Duncan biog. in the hope of settling down to some Real Work, I should have known that something else would come up: a rather good Sean Scully monograph in the local library. I read it through in an afternoon & then spend another day plundering it. (Watch this space).
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Another visit to The Dump. Piles of dead electronics, collapsed cardboard, vacant chairs. All too evident where this is leading ...
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Catch up on the last Thick of It via BBC iPlayer, cursing like Malcolm Tucker the way the BBC block this service to ex-pat viewing. In a way, the very people who'd most appreciate it.
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Images of the US hurricane. Thoughts go out to all (any?) Blog readers over there on the East Coast (Geof ... Lisa J ... Michael L ... ).
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Last night we take advantage of the girls being out Hallowe'ening & go to Le Fils de Jules in search of cassoulet. The waitress explains it's too early in the month - tant pis, it was delicious. Instead we settle for confit canard & a bottle of Spanish red. As if this wasn't good enough, there just happens to be a tea shop a few doors down selling the very glass teapot I have been in search of and a new (to me) green tea - Houjicha (grilled Sencha). I make a pot when we get home and it's an extraordinary taste - if I were to say something similar to a mouthful of scallops in garlic and parsley infused with burnt hay? That probably sounds ghastly but it's not, strangely.
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The Reading Oxfam bookshop delivers again, this time an old book on board games (ideal for demolition & collaging) plus the de Botton volume on Proust. I'm always in two (or more) minds about de B - a mixture of irritation and admiration and jealousy I suppose. I refused to read this when it first came out but now prejudices have softened. Interestingly, the previous reader has pencilled the following on the fly leaf: finished 5 Aug - good Don't suggest re-read but dip in again pg 141 pg 156 pg 195. How odd.
The book is good, I have to admit. As much for what it says about Proust (I assume mostly derived from de B's reading of the letters, biographies & other studies) as its structure. The decision to work the material as a series of How To chapters and the fragmentary paragraphs is sweet. A volume to read in tandem with Keith Waldrop's Jacob Delafon text.
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The onion soup is cooked.
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