This is the holiday blog, so everything gets thrown into it, not to be published until I return, as a visit to the splendid Millennium library in Norwich found their Peoples Network PCs painfully slow (why should public libraries be poor relations when it comes to bandwidth?). Also clogged up with au pairs e-mailing home etc, but I found an unused one in the depths of their business information centre.
So an obituary to start with, for as I prepared to drive self and son up the M23, M25 and M11 to Cambridge on Saturday 14th August, I read the obituary of Julia Child in the Independent, which saddened me. As many of my generation must have done, I learnt to cook from her masterwork with Simone Bertholle and Louise Beck, Mastering the art of French cooking. And subsequent obituaries appeared in the Times on Monday 16th August and I expect a Guardian one any day now (yes indeed there was)
Frightful drive up here, hot and the motorways crammed, accidents everywhere.
Sunday a better journey to Norfolk, the light now very late August, balanced between summer and autumn, Norfolk is an odd place, apart from its Cowardly flatness.
From the book I’m reading at the moment:
“And bollocks to the librarians too,-of all the ponces who feast off the dead body of Literature, the carrion who feed on the dead corpses of good men, writers, pay us fuckall and go out to lunch every day of the working week, etc, […]of all these, I SAY, the bleeding (though they have no lifeblood) librarians are the worst… B.S. Johnson, letter to Zulfikar Ghose, 16 October 1967, quoted in :
Coe. Jonathan
Like a fiery elephant: the story of B.S.Johnson
London: Picador, 2004
033035048x
Perhaps a little unfair to this great profession of mine