A little reading

 

Mostly I have been doing puzzles, but also a little reading. 'The Rest of Our Lives' by Ben Markovits: strangely another book about someone possibly dying of cancer, and like Panenka he is very much in denial. Tom is planning to drive away from his marriage, but when he does it doesn't feel quite as he anticipated. It's a very 'blokey' book (if that's a word?). Liked this little bit, not the only time he mentioned a 'power dynamic', which feels like something that men are often concerned with, and cars, and the notion that women are impressed by them:

"We took his car. It's a funny thing to be driven around by your son, you feel the power dynamic shifting. He had an old Acura Legend, which he'd bought secondhand and still smelled of cigarettes. But it was a nice-looking car and I thought, Betty wouldn't mind driving around in this. The air-conditioning stank though, at least at first, so he turned it on and kept the windows open until we got to the highway. After that the road was too loud." (p.195)

Then on the next page, this lovely sentence: "All of this makes it look like we were having a conversation, but it was more like, sometimes one of us spoke." So beautifully observed, made the book worth reading.

'Man With a Seagull on his Head' by Harriet Page was requested after the others from Bluemoose Books so impressed me. Quirkiness will always win me over and this one ticks all the boxes. Raymond is hit on the head by a dying seagull, an event witnessed by Jennifer. It has a huge impact on his life, and very little on hers. A copy of the local paper plays a significant role and in the end Mira transports an entire bungalow to the Tate Modern. How's that for a teaser trailer. 

"Jennifer looked up. Here she was, in her shop. The silence was heavy; the street seemed emptied out in a way that made her wonder if she'd missed something, some catastrophe. But then a lone car drove slowly past and, as the sound of the engine receded, she caught the distant judder-judder of machinery making holes in the road somewhere, and now a woman walking past, a child running on behind, and she breathed again, relieved, and a little disappointed too, that the world was carrying on. The day she'd seen the seagull fall on the head of the man called Ray Eccles seemed impossibly remote, the memory a mist around her mind in which she flailed about for a moment trying to grab at least some recollection of his face." (p.53)

Caring for my sister leaves a lot of time for reflection and introspection. So I wrote a poem. My life has become small, focused on the happenings in the living room, but hers, swiftly and unimaginably, has become tiny.

Such a little life A little eye open A little drink A little bite A little wash A little teeth clean A little hair brush A little foot rub A little roll over A little blanket But not a little sleep A long long sleep Everything else gets smaller but not the sleep

Stay safe. Be kind.