Treadmill

Last week was a treadmill of a week and this promises to be the same, starting at 8am this morning with the car entering for its yearly service and MOT, a frantic exchange with the Health Centre to get an emergency prescription for asthma medication and a wheezy walk down to fill in the necessary forms. I want to go back to bed.

The sun is shining and the world looks good but I'm seeing it through tarnished lenses I'm afraid. Bright spots were finding a couple of books at a car boot worth £70 a piece and getting them for £7 with other lesser titles; reading three good books - good in different ways - and suddenly noticing the difference in Sanders who has calmed down during the hols, is breathing better and is much happier. A dose of maths homework threatened to shake the tranquility but I'm hoping an hour or two with the Cuisenaire rods later in the week will help form a few basic concepts.

The good books were'Midnight Fugue' by Reg Hill. 'Aftershock' Quintin Jardine. 'Blacklist' by Sara Paretsky. Of these Reginald Hill wins my overall prize. Jardine is awful at dialogue, painful clunky exchanges which really grit my teeth, but his plot is fast and interesting. Paretsky's undeniably a good writer but takes herself a bit seriously IMO; there's no humour to speak of and that particular plot was a trifle tedious to follow.

I also saw 'Rashoman' by Kurosawa Akira yesterday. I'm happy to have seen it and ticked it off (it won a Golden Lion and an Academy Award) but to be honest I'm not a fan of the early Japanese film-makers in the way my ex is. This reminded me of Sahekespeare at times (Kurosawa did direct the making of a couple of Shakespeare plays as film apparently) but it also reminded me also of Chaucer in its simplistic view of human nature, and a bit of Beckett for long-drawn out boring bits. Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough and need rapid entertainment - in other words I have the 21st century disease.