Had a lovely day yesterday with the I Love Everything walking contingent, down Chichester Harbour way. Nice flat walking with lots of local fauna to observe (including the Lesser-Spotted Sailing Toff, all over the place at Itchenor and Bosham - never seen so many loafers without socks in one day before). Good beer at the imaginatively named Ship Inn, good ferry trip across the estuary, and good Norman church at Bosham. I now have two blisters and a strong desire to purchase proper walking shoes.

Book 38: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
I'm amazed I could even bring myself to pick this up after the turgid experience that was The Fortess of Solitude, but thank heavens I did because it's bloody good. Bit of a crime thriller, bit of a comedy, bit of a psychodrama. The protagonist suffers from Tourette's Syndrome, and I don't know if Lethem has any personal experience of this (I don't either) but it seemed SO well done, conveying the weird logic and poetry of the condition as well as the absurdity and stigma. I don't know what went wrong with TFoS, just a surfeit of ambition perhaps.

13:14

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