books and their covers & a glimpse of fame

I was down in Seville at the weekend, at the Feria del Libro, for a cuentacuentos session and book signing.

Seville: cool and green in the morning

The story-telling was on the Saturday morning and the guys from the bookshop who had invited me warned me not to expect a big audience; apparently 11:30 is considered early in Seville.

Of course, people go to bed very late – the women in the next room to me in the hotel clearly didn’t go out till after 11:00 on the Friday night and came back at about 4:30am. It seems odd, though, that the best part of the day – first thing after the sun gets up and while it’s all still fresh and cool – should be wasted. Particularly as, by lunch time, Seville heat can be suffocating.

what life isn’t:

 

...a bowl of cherries

With three mature cerezos in full fruit, we really do need to get a full-sized deep freezer for this time of year.

narrators and writers

Re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, I was taken by the comments about objectivity in writing in this conversation between Lord Peter Wimsey and 15-year-old Miss Hilary Thorpe.

It’s just after Easter. Hilary’s mother died at New Year and now an unidentified corpse has been found in the grave which was being prepared for her father who has just died.

“[...] You and Dad would have got on splendidly. Oh, by the way – you know where Dad and Mother are buried, don’t you? I expect that was the first place you looked at.”
“Well, It was; but I’d rather like to look at it again. You see, I’m wondering just exactly how the- the–”
“How they got the body there? Yes, I thought you’d be wondering that. I’ve been wondering, too. Uncle doesn’t think it’s nice of me to wonder anything of the sort. But it really makes things easier to do a little wondering, I mean, if you’re once interested in a thing it makes it seem less real. That’s not the right word, though.”
“Less personal?”

doing what they do best

This snippet caught my eye in yesterday’s Madrid edition of ¡Qué!:

Busman's holiday?

If the agentes de Movilidad are planning to movilizarse, how can that count as a strike?

some corner of a foreign hospital research lab

Having worked hard in the garden on Saturday, not realising just how strong the sun was, I was probably fortunate only to feel slightly under the weather yesterday. Sunstroke can be fatal, of course, and is perhaps more likely to be so for those of us who were brought up in colder, wetter, and altogether greyer, northern climes.

So I was interested to read this story about the Brits in Alicante who have worked out what to do if (when?) they die here. Apparently many of the 350,000 who are resident there are donating their bodies to science.