So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, […]
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop […]
It occurred to me today I might read only Sebald and Shirley Hazzard, alternately, for the rest of the year and read deeply rather than widely. This novel is so good I have just sat down and read thirty pages aloud in the afternoon sun, the leaves scratching shadows on the page and the riverwater […]
Today I’m having ale and potato chips for lunch. Last night, ice cream for dinner. I was planning a little ice-cream-shop crawl but the first (pistachio with hazelnuts) was so rich and creamy it did me in. In between there were pancakes for breakfast. A snack ‘n’ dessert weekend. I love how the real ale […]
