We Bought The Farm

That Time of Year

Well, folks, I'm having a big birthday this week and we're all off to Barcelona to celebrate this, the anniversary and half-term and Valentine's Day all rolled into one. So, don't expect much news from these quarters for the next couple of weeks.

Seven Years Later

The Past Comes Alive Through Reading

If the number of books I read is any indicator of my leisure time (and I would posit that it is), then it should be obvious that I haven't been getting through much lately. Until now, that is. And it is alway such a delight to find that time, squeezed in between stops on my commuter train, or over a bagel at the breakfast table when I'm "home alone" at my London digs, or enjoying my "night off" on Tuesdays.

I made a conscious decision when we came back from Brazil to stop buying books until I'd made some headway into the large backlog of reading that I'd piled up as a result of ordering a massive list of books just before the birth of our second child. As our son has just turned three, that's a pretty good indicator of how long it's taken me to clear the shelves. Not entirely - I probably never will - but to the point where I sometimes struggle to find something that grabs me.

So it helps a lot that my housemate in London, where I spend three nights a week, has a very well stocked library with very little overlap to my own previous reading. I've definitely found a new source of good reads on the cheap (yes, yes, I've heard of the library).

I've just finished reading Shusaku Endo's Scandal, which I found hard to put down, full as it is of sex and death and insinuations of darkness. I'd heard of Endo before as a Catholic voice in Japan, especially his Silence, which is on my wish list, although I'd not read any of his work. And here were a couple of his novels right on the shelf.

Scandal took me back to the stretches I spent working in Japan. Long weekends in Tokyo hanging out with my mates in Roppongi, Harajuku and Kamata. Some of the very few times I've actually enjoyed clubbing, staying out all night until the first trains. Cold rainy streets and leafless trees. The decadence of the gaijin nightclubs stopped short of some of the excesses of Scandal but it was easy for me to form an image as a result. I'm looking forward to the next Endo, and then more from the shelves.

And then last night I had a really amazing journey up from London to the country where we live at the weekend. I was reading some of the Flannery O'Connor stories - A View of the Woods (which follows on extremely well from the Endo), The Enduring Chill, The Comforts of Home and Everything That Rises Must Converge. And I had Lucinda Williams on the iPod. And I was barrelling across the Southeast of England and in a reverie I was suddenly back in the US. The hot sweaty summer I spent living in Muncie, Indiana. One night, after a fight with a girlfriend, she threw a ring I had given her (not engagement, mind) into the White River. I was knee-deep in the river looking for the ring by moonlight.

One night when I was working in Lake Charles, Louisiana, my ex and I decided to go to out in the sticks toward Lafayette looking for some zydeco. We were hoping we might even come across Boozoo Chavis, but we didn't. However, we did come across a magical cajun hootenany of sorts. As the night wore on, we each got a turn on the triangle and some of the other percussion - I've never forgotten the comment, "The Cajuns are the only ones doing anything with the triangle these days." The name of the band has slipped my mind, my ex took the Boozoo CD, but the evening remains to be drawn out of my past on nights like last night.