On ne trinque pas tout seul. On boit sans amitié, sans rien, comme une vache, et ça, ça oui, c'est mauvais, si mauvais qu'il n'y a même pas plus mauvais au corps.
(p 28)
Du moins, c'est que je pensais adolescent et un peu après. Plus après, j'ai trouvé que, dans certaines circonstances, un bon livre, ou même juste mes propres pensées, peuvent être une compagnie aussi bonne que les gens.
Quite recently I've begun watching iPlayer programmes again - as in sitting and really watching, rather than just having them on as background noise to hear the language(s) of Eden. Funnily, but perhaps inevitably, it turned out I consequently lack the time for reading books, so without meaning to stopped completely, although as usual I'm into a few. It's as if books (arguably my surest pleasure) turned into my Lenten sacrifice, and I was dedicating the time to whittling down the exorbitant to-do list related to my laptop and 'non-virtual' life.
[Added 19/3/22: Later I indeed decided to not read fiction as my Lenten sacrifice.]
A succinct description of the country's development from the first settlements to the current century, ideal for those who have so far only heard or read about the Vikings. Sometimes the languages slips a bit into resembling more a transcript of a junior high school lesson than of a lecture for adult public (and indeed where most writers would probably present a table with some demographic statistics, the author prefers to narrate some historical anecdote or a tale about a particular person), but not really annoyingly so. My only two quibbles are too much space dedicated to WWII, and numbering of monarchs with Arabic, rather than Roman, numerals (in an English text, "King Harald 5" looks more like the name of a third-rate Hollywood fantasy movie than of the current monarch).
Où c'est de la satire politique / sociale, il est drôle. Où c'est de la satire sur les liaisons sexuelles (c'est-à-dire, fornications), il est ennuyeux. Malheuresement, environ le troisième quartier du livre paraît comme que l'auteur n'écrive que de baiser.
Citation:
Mais le curé Ponosse est doué de cette obstination des natures faibles, qui sont capable des grands efforts pour défendre leur tranquillité.
(de Augustin Ponosse, p 179)
Oui, c'est moi. Capable de faire beaucoup pour ne devoir rien faire.
In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro.
(quoted in Umberto Eco: Il nome della rosa)
Which translates as "Everywhere I have sought peace and not found it, except in a corner with a book."
I usually only note down quotations I've come across in their original context, rather than quoted by a 'third party', but this is one of those rare exceptions that I like so much I can't just let them go. Because this truthfully describes most parts of my life, including my childhood: not finding the real world calm enough for my liking no matter where I went, unless escaping somewhere secluded, and there into the virtual world of literature.
Parfois, je suis simplement bête. Je savais pour plus d'une décennie qu'il y a des livres dont on peut trouver et commander sur la site amazon.co.uk, mais pas sur amazon.com. Néanmoins, quand je n'ai pas vu ce roman de Gabriel Chevallier sur la site britannique, il m'a pris plusieurs mois, peut-être même un an ou deux, pour m'apercevoir que j'ai pu le chercher sur amazon.fr. Bien sûr, il a été là - et maintenant il est déjà chez moi.
When I first read Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time two years ago, I was enthralled by it, amazed at how much the narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone, reminded me of myself. Re-reading it last year, the novelty was no longer there, so I was able to notice that there were also many ways in which we were quite different.
I've just finished reading it for a third time. It remains one of my favourite books; I still see quite a lot of similarities and quite a few dissimilarities between Christopher and myself; but there were also two things about him which troubled me. First, his propensity to use violence against people who (physically) touch him: I deplore violence except under very extreme circumstances (I always preferred flighting to fighting, although some might argue that's just my bodily weakness and my cowardice). But then, it may just be an instinctive reaction he has no control of.
More importantly, I was troubled by his obsession with sitting a particular maths exam. When he's told, towards the end of the book, that he'll have to wait for a year before that would be possible, he becomes comletely petulant. And it seems to me that this doesn't stem directly from his being autistic, but from his having been (on account of his autism) pampered all his life by those close to him. In other words, it doesn't feel like an autistic, but like a spoilt-child behaviour. After all, it's nothing vital, just a bloody certificate.
Naturally, that doesn't mean I stopped liking him. My real-life best friends tend to have one or two character traits that I highly disapprove of as well. Come to think of it, so do I.
In a way it's almost droll. You'd expect that when you're told that at best you only have a few years left, you'd stop buying new books, there being so many you want to read once more before you go. You'd think that in particular you'd buy no 'educative' ones, for what use you'd have for any thus acquired new knowledge? You'd think you'd focus on books in those languages you know best, to get the most satisfaction from what you read.
Yet unable to help myself I ended up yesterday buying three books in French (the one amongst my four 'primary' languages I'm weakest at) and two history books. I guess that if you're an avid, unsatiable bookworm, you're an avid, unsatiable bookworm till the end.
Bu toigh leis a bhith a' dèanamh nithean anns an robh ùidh aige fhèin. An robh sin ceàrr seach nach robh ùidh aig càch annta? Cha robh esan a' smaoineachadh gun robh.
(td 80 anns an chruinneachadh Caogad san Fhàsach)
Eadhon dar a bha mi òg, cha robh ùidh agam ann an iomadh nì anns an robh ùidh aig mo chàirdean, mo cho-aoisean: ball-coise, càraichean, caileagan agus mar sin sìos. Aig an aon àm, bha ùidh agam ann an grunnan nì anns nach robh ùidh aig cha mhòr duine sam bi eile air a bha mi eòlach: cànanan, Alba, òganaich agus mar sin air adhart. Agus cha do dh'atharraich sin rè nam bliadhnaichean.
Seadh, cha robh 's chan eil e idir furasta aig amannan. Ach a dh'aindeoin sin, cha chreid mi gum bithinn na bu thoilichte, mar eisimpleir, a' coimhead air geama ball-coise ann an telebhisean le daoine eile 's a' leigeil orm gun robh e inntinneach dhomhsa, seach a bhith ag ionnsachadh Gàidhlig nam aonar. Mar a tha an seanfhacal ag ràdh, 'sòlas an dara duine, dòlas an duine eile'.
When one door closes, another one opens.
For several years I was reading virtually solely Kindle e-books, possessing less than four prints. Moving flat as often as I had to during my life, it made sense to have as few as possible to move each time I did. However, when I moved, at the beginning of summer, to a flat owned by my sister and her husband, the sitution changed: I could suddenly expect not to have to flit again any time soon, if ever. So I resolved to and actually began anew buying printed books.
Kindle has its advantages of course, but for an old fogey like me, when all is said and done, it's just an inadequate substitute. The bliss of holding in my hands and enjoying 'real' books once more!
Unfortunatelly, I soon discovered that post-Brexit Amazon deliveries into the EU are unreliable (more than once I had an order stuck for a month on the French border, only to be then without any explanation returned back to Amazon), and getting them by post makes the delivery rather costly. I also realised that my sick pay would soon come to an end and I would be dependent on a (much lower) disability pension. So I stopped buying more.
And then my sister mentioned that she still had some books I had stored at hers years ago before one of my moves and quite forgotten about. She then sent me photos of that part of her bookcase with books in English, and I saw there several I mean to deprive her of, or at least borrow for some time. She already brought me the first two I chose.
Looks like I'll be able to enjoy reading prints for at least several more months to come.
If you have to decay, decay with elegance and grace.
(p 254 in the How to be a Brit omnibus)
Yes, I should accept that I'll probably never again be able to work full time, walk several miles in a oner, leave this country even for a week's trip, will have to think twice each time before spending any money, take conscientious care of my diet and regimen and so on. But maybe, with a bit of luck, I'll be able to go through the rest of my life without feeling, behaving and looking as a victim of some tragedy, preserving instead my mental faculties and my dignity.
He was terrified of losing everything he had, so he’d convinced himself he had nothing to lose.
Maybe that's one of the mistakes I did myself after discovering I was probably exiled forever: having had lost so much throughout my life I convinced myself I'd lost everything, and consequently also lost all interest in the future, carrying on merely out of inertia and remnants of defiance.
Pour la plupart de la journée (quand je ne dormais pas) je lisais La Grande Traversée, un album Astérix que je n'ai connu pas : aussi bon que les autres. Je l'ai commencé et fini ; apparemment mon français n'est pas toujours complètement rouillé (du moins, mon français passif).
Et au soir ma sœur et mon beau-frère sont venus : ils m'ont apportés des béquille. Nous espérons qu'elles m'aideront à marcher avec mon hypotension. J'ai essayé et c'est un peu meilleur ; mais je verrai dans la nuit.
'My mum always told me money can’t buy you happiness, sir.’
Yes, Vimes thought, so did my ma, but she was glad enough when I gave her my first wages, because it meant we could have a meal with meat in it, even if we didn’t know what kind of meat it was. That’s happiness, isn’t it? Blimey, the lies we tell ourselves …
It is refreshing to read a favourite author of yours attacking a cliché which has a grain of truth in it but has by constant repetition been turned into something very remote from it. Because of course there are some sorts of happiness no amount of money can buy, like true friendship or having good luck, but there are likewise many sorts of happiness that you absolutely can buy for money, from good food and drink to a comfortable home to a pleasant trip or book and so on and so forth ...
That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.
For me the problem isn't about visual but about auditory pollution, but otherwise I absolutely agree: as soon as you find someplace that feels 'nice and peaceful', pretty soon somebody will start DIY, blethering or even shouting, playing music, whatever to make the place no longer peaceful. The only way to prevent this is simply being somewhere where there are no people.
But that, of course, has problems of its own.
There was work to do. It was dull, but it had to be done. So he did it.
One of the few things I pride myself on is this: I'm certainly no friend of doing useless work, but when something has to be done, I'm not in the habit of shirking it or 'delegating' it to somebody else. It has to be done, so it will. Maybe that's why my flaws were often forgiven by my employers: they knew that if I get a dull but reasonable task I'll just go and do it, rather than look for excuses like far too many of the others.
They might have done, many of them. So many people will do. But once you've actually been in love, you can't live with "will do"; it's worse than living with yourself.
This can be a problem not just with romantic relationships. Of course, like everybody I often do use and even enjoy substitutes for the real thing: e-reader for a printed book, e-cig for a tobacco one, masturbation for sex and so on. But I guess that just as often a substitute is even worse than total absence: an obvious example is the preferability of silence to music one doesn't like, or even music one likes but isn't at the moment in the mood for. And I remember how after my three boon companions in a certain town left it shortly one after another, I began visiting different pubs - on my own, because meeting those left reminded me about the absence of those three more painfully than solitude.
Yesterday I read an article in The Guardian in which film-makers and writers recalled 'gay' film scenes that had a profound effect on them; I also read quite a few of the comments of the article's readers remembering theirs; and it occurred to me that I could hardly recollect my own 'firsts'.
Maybe this is because I had to do without any while still struggling with who I was. As far as I can remember, the first film I saw that had homosexuality as one of the main topics was the 1994 Fresa y chocolate; and unless I'm much mistaken the first gay kiss I saw on the silver screen happened in 1997's The Full Monty (provided it was actually a kiss and not just an embrace) or in Wilde of the same year. But I had come out in 1989, and experienced my own first loving kiss - and more - in 1991.
Not that literature was any better. The first 'gay book' I came across was the 1993 anthology The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. Up till then there were just hints (which I often even failed to decipher as such at that time), at best a minor character who was gay but not allowed to do more about it than say so.
In short, I had no 'revelatory' experiences of this kind. For all that, each time I watched or read somebody daring to go further in breaking the taboos surrounding us, it was a source of immesurable pleasure to me.
Feumaidh mi aideachadh nach eil mi measail air bàrdachd Ghàidhlig. Leis an fhìrinn innse, chan eil mi uamhraidh measail air bàrdachd sa chànan sam bith, ach a-mhàin mar fhaclan òrain. Mar is bitheanta, bidh dàin (seach rosg) a' coimhead ro thoinnte dhomhsa. Agus leis nach eil mo chuid Ghàidhlig cho math agus mo chuid Bheurla (gu h-àraidh am briathrachas), chan eil iongnadh ann gu bheil bàrdach Ghàidhlig fada nas doirbhe dhomh a thuigsinn. Cuideachd, tha a' chuid as motha de bhàrdachd Ghàidhlig air an tàinig mi thairis ro thraidiseanta air mo shonsa - a' dèiligeadh sa mhòr-chuid le cuspairean nach eil glè bhuntainneach ri mo bheatha, mar chathan eadar cinnidhean, gaol iol-sheòrsach, agus mar sin sìos.
When a character in Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time sees an Igor for the first time, he's naturally somewhat taken aback by all those scars and stitches, but reassured by somebody else telling him this was a 'cultural' thing.
‘Cultural, is it?’ Dr Hopkins looked relieved. He was a man who tried to see the best in everybody, but the city had got rather complicated since he was a boy, with dwarfs and trolls and golems and even zombies. He wasn’t sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was ‘cultural’, apparently, and you couldn’t object to that, so he didn’t. ‘Cultural’ sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren’t really there.
Now this is beautifully ambivalent. You can interpret it as 'people often see problems in other cultures where there are none and need to be shown they are just prejudiced'. And you can interpret it as 'the easiest way of dealing with a problem is pretending it doesn't exist'. Knowing Pratchett's style I tend towards the latter interpretation: an ironic take on those who could accept even human sacrifice if they were told it was an inseparable part of a particular culture's tradition.
