hello

Apologies. This is later than usual. We’ve been to Manchester and The Wirral today. Now we’re in Derbyshire and I’ve seen too much motorway.

Five things:

1. Alan Bennett was asked about his 40 years of diary-keeping:

   “One of the things that can be said about keeping a diary is that it gets you into literature by the back door. This isn't literature, you tell yourself. It's just jotting, the things that occur, the stuff that happens. I've not always found people easy to talk to. But I've found it easy to talk to myself, which is what a diary is.”

2. I love a good list. This is the list of things that John Adams said should be used to mark anniversaries of US independence:

   “Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations”

   I’m glad he included bells.

3. Astonishingly, Interesting is now sold out. I had to explain it to someone the other day and found myself reaching for these words from Mary Cappello:

   “Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form.”

   and

   “The lecture will have succeeded, if, like the essay, it cannot be summarized, but only experienced.”

4. Volume 2 is as delightful as Volume 1

5. This episode of The Verb features discussion of Carol Ann Duffy and her frequent use of the ‘short verbless sentence’, which I guess is autological. Now all open-eared.

   A QUESTION

Does anyone know anything about this Betjeman bus sign? The internet isn’t helping.

I’ll give you back your day

russell

(There are 1029 of you. The Taoist anthology Yunji qiqian was compiled in 1029. Wikipedia says ‘translating the opaque title into English is difficult’ and suggests “Seven Lots from the Bookbag of the Clouds")