Music, books and plumbing

Shuffle play is a wondrous thing on digital music playing equipment until you find that someone has placed their own choices on said equipment. Listening to an eclectic (not) mix of Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, Crosby Stills and Nash (and Young sometimes), White Stripes, Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, various folkies etc. when out of the blue comes a disco hit from the eighties. Slightly disturbing. Lisa and I are totally incompatible musically except for Cambridge Folk Festival where I like the music and she likes the atmosphere (too many fiddles apparently). Surely you can't have too many fiddles.

I'm currently reading Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'. I'm not normally one for fiction but I picked it up due to its famous size and not necessarily for the content which is not too bad although, like much fiction, there are glaring omissions, coincidences, lucky breaks, exaggerated incidents etc all of which annoy me about reading this genre. However to balance this all up I am also reading Hunter S Thompson's 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' which is as about as far in the other direction as it's possible to go. It's just one big exaggerated incident. Brilliant.

A near neighbour of mine across here is Chris. He is an ex-pilot who has now retired and writes and edits books, poetry etc. He pitched up today clutching a copy of 'Ramlin Rose The Boatwoman's Story' by Sheila Stewart. I hadn't read this and it came as a bit of a surprise to find a book on the English canals in deepest France. It'll give me a break from Tolstoy at least. Chris was the one who took me in hand on my first year here and taught me all I needed to know about plumbing and how to fix it at no cost. Since this time there has never been a plumber on the site and the plumbing looks like this is most definitely the case. But it works and doesn't leak and I am eternally grateful to Chris for this.