Start the week #111

Meeting Jim and his wife, and other stuff

Greetings!

I said to Substack ages ago in Office Hours, a weekly discussion forum they used to host, that it would be great to be able to have coloured text, and here we are! I also asked them to enable text flow around a graphic. Also, a spellchecker wouldn’t come amiss. Fingers crossed!

But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.

Terry

Meeting Jim and Erin

Recently, Elaine and I met up with Jim Cummings and his wife, Erin. If you read Jim’s Substack then you’ll know that he writes interesting stuff and great short stories. However, the stories are usually a bit on the dark side, so before the date in question, we took certain precautions. Well, you never know if someone is going to turn out to be an axe murderer or not, so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Therefore we took out extra life insurance, told our friends where we were going, and made sure we checked in with them every hour.

All of which, it transpired, was completely unnecessary. We spent a very pleasant afternoon visiting particular places in London, very ably guided by Elaine, whose idea of a pleasant stroll is a 10 mile route march. Here are the places we visited; I don’t think I’ve left anything out. It’s in the form of a list, so you might want to get hold of a map of central London and see if you can find the places on it. Exciting, eh?

London quiz, by Terry Freedman

And, especially for Sharron Bassano, here are some photos. Sharron writes great short fiction, micro fiction really, over at LEAVES . Sharron wanted me to give Jim a big kiss from her. YEUCHHH!!! You gotta draw the line, that’s what I always say. Anyway, here are the pix:

From L to R: All 4 of us, Jim and Erin, Elaine and Erin

A bookish problem

I have just read a short essay by Georges Perec called Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books. The piece appears in a book called Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.

I was interested in this because of my own book storing problem. Getting rid of books is all very well, but the number doesn’t seem to go down. I recently rearranged my bookshelves so that, broadly speaking, the same sorts of subjects are grouped together, but even so, finding a particular book is sometimes more a matter of luck than judgement.

My bookshelves, by Terry Freedman

Anyway, Perec, after discussing the various places that books are stored, which in my case tends to be on coffee tables, on the floor next to an armchair, on my desk, next to the bed, on the floor in my office, and so on, he talks about a friend of his who had the bright idea of limiting his book collection to 361 books. But he soon realised that it made more sense to count authors rather than books, because some people write more than one book. But that proved to be not useful because some things, like the Impressionists, span more than one author or, in this case, artists. Therefore he decided to limit his book collection to 361 subjects, which basically means, if you think about it, an almost infinite number of books for most people, thereby rendering the exercise completely pointless!

Finally…

I found this video quite chortlesome:

That’s it from me. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this.

I’ve set the autopaywall feature to place all posts behind a paywall after 30 days.