Caring And Sharing

Sam and Shiraz next door have been borrowing our bin while we've been away and this morning- a collection day- it's full of their rubbish, which might have been a problem if Renee next door on the other side (who's away all the time) hadn't asked me last time I saw her to put her bin out for her- which I did last night having first added some rubbish of my own.

Now there's neighbourliness for you!

His Last Vow

Weeeell....that was exciting and witty and clever- and very much better than episodes one and two. It also picked up on annoying things from those earlier episodes and made them a little less annoying. Also it was really cool to cast Rupert Murdoch as the villain.

But, I'm not really a fanboy. I don't invest enough in the characters. All this Sherlock loves John but John loves Mary business is plastered on too thickly for my taste. I want deduction, I want crime solving. I don't go to Sherlock Holmes for romance.

Finally, for all that it had me by the nose while I was watching, I find, now it's over, that my memory of it is melting like snow in an April thaw. There were guns and helicopters and betrayals and twists and turns but what did it contain of any substance? A lot of cynicism followed by a lot of sugar to take away the taste.

And sugar, as even the Department of Health is finally having to acknowledge, is bad for us.

Austerlitz: W.G. Sebald

Austerlitz is an ancient mariner with a tale to tell that has no albatrosses in it, a man beached and abandoned by history, an observer of life whose single most decisive action has been to burn his accumulated observations, He tells his story over time as he fades- improbably- in and out of the life of an equally ghostly narrator.

This is music for woodwind- with oboe predominant: discursive, melancholic- and flowing, flowing, flowing,