But tomorrow is a terrible state of affairs and I'll be able to concentrate on something else. Time was that a bank holiday would have 14 meetings and all sorts of choice, my grandad warning of 'false favourites' because it was not proper racing people there, but the Zetland Gold Cup at Redcar is a poor highlight. I might have a case to take the Jockey Club to court for restraint of trade.
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I needed a recovery period having gone through Emma Smith's Shakespeare book like Ian Wright through the Fulham defence but Les Faux Monnayeurs survived the hiatus and was good to return to. It's not a book that lends itself to a hiatus, though, being an involved network of touchy relationships between some febrile characters. Let's not worry about that too much, it's not as if I've got to do an exam on it. Gide is gorgeous and provides some sumptuous passages that make the bleakness luminously attractive and if that's what it's like in translation, imagine how good it must be in French and I might even try it that way next time.
'I knew I could count on you,' she said, holding out her hand with a look on her face of tender, resigned sadness, and yet a look that was smiling too, and more touching than beauty itself.
So, top marks, Andre, have a Nobel Prize. I'll be back to some more 40 year old paperbacks before needing to order anything fresh.
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Anna Friel's Having You turned out to be a heartbreaker before it laid it on just a bit too thick at the end. Not being a film person at all, beyond Depardieu and Beart, the reason for recording it was entirely Friel-based but the real heartbreak beyond the vehicle for her to deliver her anxious single mother part one more time was the fact she was down here, filming it on Southsea seafront, and neither of us knew about the other one.
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I'm always grateful for a tip-off and so was delighted to be told about Daisy Dunn's new book on Pliny, the 'difficult second album' after her Catullus book three years ago. That seemed to be quite a success but I suspect a repeat of the publicity campaign, using Boris Johnson as 'click-bait', so I was told last time, because he is, or purports to be, a Classical scholar and somehow newsworthy.
Matthew Parris summed it up more succintly than most who have made litanies of his shifty attributes in yesterday's Times by calling him an 'incompetent scoundrel'.
If Daisy sells more books by mentioning him then one can see why publishers would but there must come a time when one wants to rise above the same sort of dodgy maneouvres that the man himself has made his trademark. And, yes, I did mention him in relation to the Catullus book but only to praise the book by saying that anything that made me agree with him must be doing something right. But, by all means, bring on the Pliny.
And, after a downturn in my click-rate of internet stuff-ordering, I have sprung back to life with Resphigi's Fountains of Rome, which I hope sounds as good when heard in full wakefulness rather than on the sublime cusp between asleep and awake at which music (maybe not Noddy Holder) can be several times more intoxicating. And the new, 90th anniversary, history of Faber & Faber, on the cover of which I can identify a number of worthy types but no Hull librarians. Perhaps he made his excuses and missed that meeting.
