It’s been a while since I felt like adding to this diary. Life is what happens when you’re not writing about it. Someone didn’t say that, I think it was a Beatle. Looking back the time has all been coloured by this newly diagnosed disease. I hope that diabetes type 2, will become just another minor annoyance and fade into the background, but at the moment it still feels like a signal from my body that time is getting shorter. In other words it’s making me morbid!

Also it’s making me grumpy. 

‘Wolf Hall’ didn’t help. I knew I wouldn’t like it but felt obliged to give it a hearing. The plot is old - A level history covered it well enough, and the characters were no more real than the history text books made them at the time. I can’t believe the research was particularly arduous.  The narrative skipped around, the cast was too large, the politics as boring as today’s, and the discomfort of living in Tudor times definitely didn’t raise my spirits. She does write very well; it’s not her fault I didn’t enjoy it. I should have known better than to try it.

Iain Rankin’s ‘Standing in a Dead Man’s Grave’ brought Rebus back and was all the better for it. I find the other chap - Fox? - very upright and dull. A Philip Pullman children’s book  ‘Count Karlstein’ caught my eye whilst I was away and proved quite amusing, but not in the same league as the Northern Lights trilogy. Less amusing was a book given to me by a much valued friend who lived on various west coast islands. It was written by a man who took up sharking for a living and met Gavin Maxwell at the time Gavin was in the middle of one of his many, usually abortive, schemes for making money, this time sharking. My friend bought it for me because he knows I like anything that touches on the life of Gavin Maxwell, who I consider an interesting character.  (His biography by Douglas Botting was excellent. Read at a time that I had a special interest in bipolar people and their problems, I found it very touching.) This particular book, on the other hand, wasn’t very well written, didn’t have much about Gavin, and had far too much about shark fishing, catching, gutting etc. etc. in bloody detail.

That about covers the reading I’ve been doing. 

The trip to the opera was amusing. More amusing than my purist ex felt it should have been. 'The Magic Flute' was written as a fairy tale and turning it into a quasi pantomime seems to me a valid way to go; not so to those who have seen more serious productions apparently. The same purists also complained about the amount of speaking; the recitative was spoken rather than half sung and the lyrics had been translated into English (they still had those supra-titles theatres have nowadays to make sure we didn’t miss the plot.) I sat, with my artist friend Jo (also a purist sadly) in a ‘reduced view’ seat from whence we had a brilliant view of the orchestra and, more importantly, the audience. Even though the theatre is in a town 25 miles from the one in which we live, the number of people that we knew was impressive. 

We missed this extra entertainment; an elderly lady - even older than me at a guess - slept through the first act, was woken for her glass of white wine in the interval and returned to sleep comfortably through the second act until near the end when she woke shouting: ‘Turn it down will you! You know I don’t like it that loud!’