april 23rd

Lance Tooks drawing from Sketches from Spain

And the date offers a number of reasons to celebrate:

It’s World Book and Copyright Day, it’s traditionally celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday and the day of his death, and it’s also the day Miguel de Cervantes died.

It’s St George’s Day, too, (San Jordi) and Castile Day – not to be confused with Bastille Day, of course – or, perhaps more accurately, El Día de Castile y León.

It seems to me quite apt to celebrate castles in Spain and the world of books on the same day, and it’s also appropriate that the picture accompanying this post is taken from Lance Tooks’ upcoming book Sketches from Spain, due out in May. (Thank you, Lance, for permission to use it!)
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Archie, Algie, Griss and an un-named tortoiseshell

On Tuesday, my first trip to the post office in nearly a week brought me a contributor’s copy of a poetry anthology, Cat Lines, published in aid of the charity El Capitán Animal Project, (the web page is in German), which funds the care of stray cats on the Canary Island of Fuerteventura.


There were four poems of mine published in the book – possibly there was space for so many as they are all very short!
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the adjective in question

They say that “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” (although I reckon the bitches are usually easy enough to spot). It’s also sometime difficult to tell if the person you’re chatting to is real or a ‘chatbot’.

I reckon that Amy must be a bot –

screen shot
– or possibly a transgender MtF who hasn’t reassigned adjective endings.
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“good enough for Keats”

Having been reminded recently that I am not as familiar with the works of P. G. Wodehouse as I should be, I downloaded an audio copy of The Clicking of Cuthbert to listen to.

It’s slightly surreal to walk around rural Spain with something so eminently English sounding in my head, and it does mean that I am liable to reply in English to any neighbourly salutation, but I don’t find as much time for reading as I’d like and some of the free audio books from librivox.org are an absolute delight, even if they are read by amateurs.
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a case for e-readers

By which I don’t mean a case as in an argument, but a case as in a binding or container.

For reasons of no relevance here, I have just followed a trail of links that led me to an advert with this illustration:

Kindle case

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