Thursday evening. Been a sort of ok-ish day. I always wake early, 3 am is quite common, and make a cup of tea and read my book, which is (still) currently Jenny Erpenbeck’s “Go Went Gone” (a book that describes a man so very much like me that it’s eerie).
Going through some back copies of the NYT that I keep to re-read, I came across an article about Bob Woodward (15/09) which included the highlighted question: “What books are on your nightstand?”. (On the whole I don’t like articles which have interviewer’s questions and direct speech answers; why can’t they turn it into indirect speech? Seems lazy.) Anyway he had tons (Spanish “montons”) of books on his nightstand, both non-fiction and fiction. I didn’t think I recognised any of them, but looking at them now they seem quite interesting and I’m going to cut out the article (using a brilliant device for newspaper clips I got from a Time Management course in the 80s).
For some reason, this made me think of Sebald – Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, … He was such a lovely man. I love his mind, how it meanders through and annotates everyday life. Go Went Gone meanders a lot. I suppose it’s about how our lives become entwined in others, and become richer and at the same time less precious, and wilder.
That cold I had last week morphed into an ear infection and now I am (hopefully temporarily) completely deaf in one ear. Very disappointing contact with my local GP surgery mid-morning hasn’t progressed either the diagnosis or the treatment. Apparently taking military grade Co-Codamol is the standard response to our NHS failures. (This sounds like some low-life article in the Spectator).
OMG what a day in politics. I’m off to cook myself a risotto. A friend told me that the name comes from the sound of adding white wine to frying rice; apparently it’s just from Italian “riso” rice. But I still hear “risssottto” in the sound.