Saturday, November 26, 2005


So today we should have spent the day in Devon catching up with my dad. However, yet again a planned visit coincided with some unusually dramatic English weather. Yesterday we had a smattering of snow, down in Devon though they had around 4 inches, resulting in some very slippery narrow roads. Dad called this morning to say that he thought that some of the roads around them were just too dodgy to try. Consequently, we had an unexpected day in Bristol – What to do?

Decided that it would be good to catch up with Orynthia’s mum, so we made our way over to her place. She jumped at the idea of visiting St Marks Road in general and Bristol Sweet Mart in particular. It’s such a great shop even more so when Orynthia’s mum is with us, as she can explain exactly what all those strange vegetables are. Following a bit of shopping we had a pleasant lunch in the Old Casbah (£18 for 3 of us!), whilst we caught up on the family news.

Whilst we were in St Marks Road, I picked up a solo CD by the Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau. It’s a live recording of a gig in Tokyo (I love that you can actually hear people coughing in the gaps between songs!) It includes a fantastic version of the Radiohead tune “ Paranoid Android” which goes on for almost 20 minutes. Set me back all of £1.50!

We been doing some more holiday visiting over the last week, my sister has been in for some pretty serious work. For once she let us help her out, which was nice. She is back at home now with her books and dogs, hopefully everything will be ok for her. We really don’t want to spend any time in the B.R.I. next year.

I know I’m repeating myself but really, Moby-Dick is just fantastic. It’s so much funnier than I imagined. Herman Melville has such a brilliant way with words; I love all the little distractions and tangents in the book. Genius!

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