Getting Up To Date On A Couple Of Things

We'd been wondering what was going on next door- where building work seems to have been abandoned- so we were glad to catch Shiraz on a flying visit to his half-completed home. He gave us a tour of the site- nice new windows, chimney breast gone, the upstairs ceilings ripped out- while fulminating about how he's going to "fucking kill" his builder- who seems to have taken the money, done half the work, then downed tools and asked for more.

I got an email yesterday from K.A. Hunter- with whom, at the beginning of the last decade, I edited a short-lived magazine called the Carriage House Review (she was the gaffer; I was the assistant editor and got to winnow vast quantities of short fiction).  It was a transatlantic relationship- conducted entirely by post and email- and when the magazine folded- as it did after three issues- correspondence lapsed and I never learned what exactly had gone wrong. It was a good little magazine while it lasted and I was proud of it.  Maybe now I'll get the full story. 

Change And Decay

I notice my dentist no longer talks about "fillings" but "reconstructions".

It makes me feel like a National Trust property.