Seachain an duine a bhíonn ina thost

The No 11 bus is very smelly. I'm making the return leg of my journey
and on both occasions the (different) buses have smelled so bad I have
had to cover my nose. Is it the people on the bus? The cleanliness of
the bus? Or is it just that I inhaled clean sea air at the weekend and
have lost my immunity to London smells as a result?

I'm wallowing in the pleasant after-glow of a very good book. It's a bit like waking up from a lovely dream and wanting to hang on to it just a little longer. The book had a rather violent end but it all worked out perfectly in the epilogue, and I feel smugly satisfied that I anticipated a number of the plot twists before they became too obvious. There's a real nack to pulling that off in detective stories: you don't want to give too much away too soon, but allowing me to figure things out just slightly before you spell it out for me makes me very happy.

I think that's why I don't like Agatha Christie very much: she introduces too many wild cards so you just can't figure it out for yourself. There you are suspecting the parson when she tells you that the butler's alibi was entirely fictitious and he was famed for his skill at archery in his youth. It's just plain annoying -- there's no scope for stretching my intellect, unless I try to guess who the culprit is based on who it's most unlikely to be.

This was the first book I've read that was set in the Second World War without being too grim about it. It wasn't as though everything was rosy; in fact, several people were killed because of the dangers of the blackout, nobody could travel anywhere because of petrol shortages, several people's houses were destroyed by bombs and nobody had anything nice to eat (except Aunt Maud). But I felt I understood it a lot more as a result, I feel much closer to understanding what living with rations actually meant when you were trying to cook a meal. I'm not a big war-head (quelle surprise!) but I did find myself interested in the war for the first time in this book.

Just one criticism: dear old Rennie needs to move away from ending all his books in isolated country houses (with such-and-such baking bread and such-and-such-other off milking the cows) with the killer breaking in and John Madden fighting them off bare-handed. It made for a good read but it did seem a little familiar, and when you've only written three JM books that's a bad thing. But he's one of my favourite authors anyway, and the great thing is that unlike many of my other favourite detective story authors, he's actually alive so there's a good chance he might write more books for me.

I bought five other books last week in a little literary spree (how could I not? I visited John Sandoe and there's a new book stall in the market that sells very good second hand books for £2) so I'll report on those once I've read them all.

Today I did another exciting thing: I visited John Sandoe Books in my
lunch break. It was just like I imagined it would be: layers and
layers and layers of books and the people had read them all.

I went there to get the new Rennie Airth book. I felt I should buy it
from them rather than Amazon as I think it was them who recommended
Rennie Airth to me (via Dad) in the first place. It was a fun trip.

This morning two exciting things happened, one good, one bad. The first was that I saw a rat on my way to work. Andy wasn't there to mind me so I had to run away. Inconsiderately, he was on the tube so I had to leave him a hysterical voicemail (I don't hold with counting h's as vowels) instead of speaking to him hysterically. I googled fear of rats: turns out musophobia (as it is less commonly know) is one of the most common specific phobias, and is often a combination of the "reasonable concern about rats and mice contaminating food supplies, which has been universal to all times, places, and cultures where stored grain attracts rodents, which then consume or contaminate the human food supply" and the startle response. Sounds sensible.

So that was an unpleasant start to the day, but it was tempered by a lovely email from my boss when I got to work thanking me for all my work since Anfal left and praising me for not letting anything major slip despite doing two people's work. So she and my boss-boss have agreed to nominate me for a £150 instant reward, which is very nice indeed. Instant rewards are a nice thing the Department does as a way to recognise good work on a particular thing, like a sort of short-term bonus. So I feel pleased.

The rest of the day was quite dull in comparison.

I've just been to a headteachers meeting in a consortium I have links
with. It was a bit frustrating because very early in the meeting I was
asked a confrontational question about a potential policy change
should the government change which naturally I couldn't answer, but it
left everyone in the room a bit annoyed with me for not being frank.

Thing is, even if I wasn't bound by the civil service code, I don't
have a crystal ball. I don't know what the outcome of the next
election will be as opinion polls, like mortgage repayments, can go up
as well as down, and even if I did know for certain that the
government was going to change, I don't know what that would mean for
this particular policy. But to all intents and purposes my answer
looked like another civil servant dodge and did nothing to make the
people in the room feel happy I was there. So it wasn't quite as good
a meeting as I hoped it would be.

Andy's abandoning me on Thursday to head to Scotland for his annual
kayaking trip. I don't know what I'm going to do while he's away but
when he was in Sheffield I ended up over-filling my time so I didn't
have any time to myself at all. I'll try not to do that this time.

One thing I'd like to do is book a piano lesson with our new local
music school, Cherry Pie Music (they have a website, google them).
They're opening a branch in Abbey Mills which is super-convenient, and
they say they do all styles of music which is ideal. My idea of what I
want is one 'classical' piece on the go at all times, which would be a
demanding one that I'd be concentrating on perfecting and really
working on technique, a jazz tune I'd be playing from chord charts,
and a rock/pop piece I'd be reading from music but augmenting with
twiddly bits by ear. And it sounds like they'd do that. They open on
Saturday so I think I'll give it a try.