It's 1.15pm and if I don't get out of bed soon there won't be much point.
I don't know why a week's annual leave is the cue for the first streaming cold since the last one also when I was on annual leave about a year ago, but it always happens. I think work holds your mind and body in a sort of balanced tension and the minute you let in some slack your immune system just says, 'thanks very much we've been waiting for this' and heads off to be challenged and do its thing.It's all good for you in the end.
Coffee arrived a while ago and some of those Choco-Leibniz biscuits which just insist that you nibble the chocolate off around the edges first. Anyway I'll live but my body said 'stay here under this lovely warm duvet with a cat curled up at your feet and bask' so I've had a glorious snuffly, sneezy morning reading three novels which I have in simultaneous progress.
My favourite way to read.
The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling, page-turning Victorian pastiche set in the fascinating world of book binding and I'm reading with that faint tinge of sadness having discovered that Belinda Starling died some weeks after undergoing routine surgery just four days after she finished this book and leaving two small children.
How I missed Anne Patchett's Bel Canto I have no idea, but her latest Run is near perfection. An unlikely accident throws together two families with unguessed connections and I am doing that best of things when you have a triple read going on, putting the book down at the most involving moments so that you can't wait to get back to it.
Finally The Rowing Lesson by Ann Landsman, this is even more unputdownable as a daughter sits at the bedside of her dying father in the Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, imagining his life as a son, a doctor and a father in the most vivid detail. Thus far he's a brash, not altogether likeable character so she's struggling to tell it like it really was. I expect developments and some mitigating circumstances.
More about all of these soon.
Now it's 1.36pm so I think I really had better shift.


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