books – Page 6 – don't confuse the narrator

expect delays

I was slightly taken aback by the road sign in the photo.

On the one hand it’s eminently logical: if the road is to be closed for seven weeks, there probably will be delays.

On the other hand, the advice to “consider alternative route” seems to have been added as an afterthought – as if we all have so much time on our hands that we could realistically contemplate sitting in our cars waiting for seven weeks watching while the contractors dig holes and fill them in.
Continue reading “expect delays”

intentionally left blank

Wondering what to write – and, indeed, wondering whether I actually would manage to get whatever I wrote posted as the phone company have let me down – I remembered the “Thing That Must Not Happen” as described in Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise:

Now, when you see in a newspaper a blank white space, bearing the legend: “THIS SPACE RESERVED FOR SO-AND-SO LTD.,” it may mean nothing very much to you, but to those who know anything of the working of advertising agencies, those words carry the ultimate, ignominious brand of incompetency and failure. So-and-so’s agents have fallen down on their job; nothing can be alleged in mitigation. It is the Thing That Must Not Happen.

Continue reading “intentionally left blank”

a sense of order

Occasionally, offices, hotels and bars choose books as a decorative element in their communal and public spaces, particularly if they have such a suitable setting and furniture as the room in the photo.

Of course, such lovely old shelves require a certain standard or style of books and, all too often, these are bought for the bindings rather than the content.
Continue reading “a sense of order”

comfort reading

Somewhere in a lock-up unit in Spain, in a box surrounded by other boxes filled with books, is my copy of The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.

It’s a simple, moral story of love and truth, where faith and magic work together to set the world to rights; It’s also one of the books I turn to when I’m in need of comfort. (At least it was before I had to leave it in storage and it will be again, I am sure.)
Continue reading “comfort reading”

yellow

The word yellow has been wandering through my mind in search of something to connect with.

It could connect with bulldozer. It could connect with huge chunky slablike somethings that hang in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t. It could connect with the small, leech-like Babel fish.

It could connect with the eyes of a huge eagle with circles tattooed on its wings, or with Kate Schechter’s battered Citroën 2CV.

It could, of course, just connect to fields like the one in the photo, and the rapeseed flowers that are spreading across the English countryside at this time of year: a veritable Suffusion of Yellow.