Not a good start for the public houses

Up this Monday morning at around 06:30 to find a sharp frost on our two flat roofs, the leylandii hedge and the back lawn. Then by 07:30 it was snowing quite hard, with the snow settling on flat roofs and back lawn - but not settling, at least so far, on the patio or the road out front. We felt sorry for all the public houses which have been cranking up for drinking and dining from today, with at least two sides open to the wind. Maybe things will look a bit brighter by opening time.

On a more cheerful note, Clarissa going much better than I had thought likely at the time of posting reference 1. Richardson manages to pack a lot of interest and suspense into the implausibly extensive epistolary output of a couple of young ladies. Although I understand that the young gentlemen will get a look in after half time, that is to say some 600 pages off yet - having reached page 130 and letter 27 by close yesterday evening. One might say a founding text for both psychoanalysts and feminists: the former for the close account of the inner workings of the heart; the latter for the portrait of the bad behaviour of the then far too controlling male sex. And all written by a successful, male printer who went to neither Oxford nor Cambridge. On the downside, some of the words do not have their current meaning and some of the sentences are hard, not to say, impossible to construe. But so far, so good.

A warfarin flavoured dream last night, possibly prompted by a forthcoming test. I was involved in developing a warfarin application for all our police forces - this being an echo of my time with the Home Office - which was not going too well because all the different forces had different ideas about how thing should be none. Conferences with senior officers. This then morphed into a muddle about my own warfarin consumption. Everything was all mixed up and there was a possibility that I had taken a double or triple dose the evening before. A serious matter indeed. At which point I woke up and after a few minutes, warfarin was all packed away where it belonged and the activities of the day proper could commence.

PS: the image above was chosen for its lurid cover. For some reason, ever since I was a child, I have been averse to abridgements, always preferring the real thing. The real thing of ten volumes which sits of the shelf, to the abridgement of one volume which might actually be read. With Frazer's 'Golden Bough' being just one case in point. I ought to be less prejudiced and take each case on its merits, but probably too old to change now.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/clarissa.html.