Travelling Home By Way Of Leamington Spa

My mother gave us a Marks and Spencer's gift card for Christmas and we decided we'd stop on our way home and spend it. What we did was drive until we felt hungry- by which time it was Warwickshire- then  left the motorway,  asked Sally Satnav to find us the nearest store and she took us to the centre of Leamington Spa. Leamington is a beautiful town- mostly built at the beginning of the 19th century- which was absolutely the greatest era for English domestic architecture- classical but neither slavish nor bombastic, with everything proportioned just so.  We stayed there once when we were doing something Shakespeare-related in nearby Stratford- and we've promised ourselves we'll repeat the experience.



It's nice to be home- and not to have an alarm clock set. I woke at seven, turned over and slept for another three quarters of an hour. It's very quiet here in town; you don't have the traffic noises you have in the country.

A Customer Who Doesn't Feel Cramped Is A Better Tempered Customer

Our Sainsbury's in Oldham is beautifully spacious- with lovely wide aisles. It gives you more elbow room and turning space than any supermarket we've visited down south. I presume this has a lot to do with the price of land. One takes note of such things when- like Ailz- one is driving a mobility scooter.

Music And Silence: Rose Tremain

An historical novel in which the characters- many of whom had a real existence in 17th century Denmark- flash constantly between two modes of being- now contradictory and complex - as surprising to themselves as they are to us- and now figures out of fairytale-  good king, bad queen, wicked stepmother, neglected child-  the archetypal aggrandizing the human and the human subverting the archetypal.

A novel told from many different viewpoints- in fragments of narrative- each with its own micro-climate of colour and mood: notes in a tune, beads on a string, sonnets in a sequence- each so finely worked and polished and rounded off it could almost stand alone- like a story by Hans Anderson perhaps.