discovery of the search for lost time

The world is shrinking.  With the snow still lying on the ground and my nasal passages and chest still snuffling and wheezing like a pig hunting for truffles, I'm reluctant to go anywhere.  I've shuffled a chair round the kitchen table so that I can sit immediately in front of the Aga.  Our Ginger has gone one better, and started sleeping on the warming plate on top of the Aga.  A vet once told me that cats don't have many nerves for detecting heat in their skins, so I removed him last night before going to my music society committee meeting, in case he should burn himself without noticing.

Since the grey tabby died, and we are no longer dishing out spoonfuls of cat food on demand to try and keep some weight on her, Our Ginger has been put on a diet.  He became a chubby creature as soon as he moved in with us, always happy to finish up any little bits of food left by any of the others, but this winter he has ballooned.  Obesity is a risk factor for diabetes in cats as well as humans.  Witnessing the grey tabby's 48 hour decline into terminal organ failure has concentrated our minds regarding the Billy Bunter character that is our (now fourth) cat, and it will be easier to stick to regular mealtimes in future, now we're not trying to keep poor grey skin-and-bones going.  The other three cats aren't keen on a transition to twice a day feeding, and I am still having to shut Our Ginger either in or out of the kitchen, while dispensing extra rations to the others on the opposite side of the door.

I have begun reading Swann's Way.  The initial impulse came from seeing a reference to Marcel Proust in the paper, and reflecting that I had never even attempted to read In Remembrance of Things Past, although I have cheerfully referred to 'Proust's madeleines' in conversation, and only yesterday noticed a Guardian journalist use 'not have to explain that Marcel Proust was not an F1 racing driver' as a way of denoting that you had met someone vaguely educated and at least moderately cultured.  It turns out that you can get Swann's way on Kindle, absolutely free.  Marcel Proust is out of copyright, and it has been put on Amazon by volunteers.  It seemed worth at least giving it a try, though in truth I expected it to be wordy and dull as hell and that I wouldn't get beyond page 50.

Of course on a Kindle you don't have page numbers, because you can choose how large you want the pages to be.  My free download has some typos, and the layout is rather peculiar here and there.  I don't deny the potential beauty of the book as a physical object (Alexandra Harris's book Romantic Moderns is published by Thames and Hudson on nice quality paper set in an attractive typeface, and I appreciated that all the time I was reading it).  Free Proust on Kindle is not even a contender in the physical object stakes.  But the narrative turns out to be unexpectedly gripping.

It has no business to be gripping.  Virtually nothing happens in the first book, or part of a book (I am so completely unfamiliar with the saga and the edition I'm reading is such a muddle that I'm not at all sure what part of the multi-volume epic I'm on).  Proust takes pages and pages to describe waking from sleep, and suffering from confusion until waking further and working out where he is.  He remembers his great aunt.  Going for walks takes more pages (or screenfuls).  And yet I am gripped.  Proust describes how his aunts will not say what they mean explicitly, but hedge around it with circumlocutions and are quite unaware that the person they are talking to hasn't grasped their meaning.  Haven't we all met people like that?  He explains how his relations form an idea of the sort of person the family friend Swann is, and then interpret and filter all future behaviour by and evidence about Swann to fit their existing concept of him.  Grayson Perry made the same point in his show (one point at which associations started to buzz in my head).  Calling it Cognitive Dissonance makes it sound more scientific, but Proust was already there.

Reading experiments inspired by a mixture of curiosity and a desire for self-improvement haven't always turned out so well.  I tried to read Doctor Zhivago and found it, and him, dreadfully boring and irritating, and I've never made it to the end of War and Peace.  Well done Amazon for the Kindle, and well done the volunteers who let me try Proust out for free, even if the typography is a bit dodgy. 

bookish pleasures

Last night I managed to do something I've never done before, and delete the task bar from my laptop.  This mystified the Systems Administrator, who asked what on earth I'd been doing, and I said nothing except try to open Windows Explorer.  The SA had to resort to the nuclear option of temporarily removing the battery.  The SA is not a fan of Windows 7.  One friend who is a Mac user says we should convert, but I couldn't face the hassle, unless I had to.

What I was trying to do was get into Amazon to buy something for my Kindle.  I was given the Kindle in the autumn for my birthday, and was thrilled with it (when the bewildered eastern European delivery driver finally managed to find our house), but the other books I was given at the same time kept me going until December, and the SA and I have a pact not to buy ourselves books in the run up to birthdays and Christmas, so once I'd finished Andrew Rawnsley's history of the last years of the Labour government on the Kindle I didn't like to get anything else.

I did download some poetry, some free and some very cheap.  Cheap poetry on Kindle turned out not to be a good idea, as the budget edition of the poems and prose of Ernest Dowson dispensed with the lines in the poetry and ran each verse together into a single paragraph.  I think that is down to inappropriate use of text recognition software, as distinct from scanning images into electronic book form.

Amazon are missing a trick when it comes to sales for Kindles, though I dare say they are working on it, because it still doesn't seem to be possible to buy a download as a present for somebody else.  A download purchased on my Amazon account is directed to my Kindle, and I can't find any option to present it to another person instead.  Amazon will let you print or e-mail gift certificates, and being able to do the same thing for an electronic book should be the next logical step.  True, you rob the recipient of the pleasure of choice compared to a gift certificate, but that's the case when you give a physical book, and part of the fun of giving and receiving books is hitting the right note, thus demonstrating how carefully you have observed and understood your loved one's tastes.

I decided to follow up the Andrew Rawnsley with Alistair Darling's memoirs.  Poor Alistair Darling, I don't think he has made it big time in the political biography stakes, as Back from the Brink is already down to £2.09 as an e-book.  The SA would like to read that as well at some point, and another area where Amazon ought to up their game with Kindles is that there needs to be a way of lending e-books other than by lending the reading device.  The SA and I share quite a few of our books, or at least we do in some subjects.  History, politics, food and some aspects of urban design are joint enthusiasms, though I won't be clamouring to borrow The Kronstadt Revolution when the SA's finished it, and the SA's familiarity with my gardening books stops at checking the covers very carefully to see which ones I've already got.  There was a new history of East London that we both eyed up and neither bought, in case the other did, and a book about skyscrapers that the SA thought about buying for me but felt embarrassed that it might really be a present to self.  The covering phrase when presenting a parcel of probable mutual interest is 'this is a bit of a present for both of us'.

Addendum  A late straggling Christmas card arrived this morning.  From the annotations on the envelope we gathered it had reached us via another house, whose occupants had kindly bothered to stick it back in the post with a note saying it wasn't theirs.  Our predecessors  probably thought the name they chose for this house was very appropriate and charming.  It is appropriate, though a bit naff, and it is unfortunate that there are at least two other houses with the same name in nearby villages.  Add in the English tendency to name a road after the place it goes to, and there's ample scope for confusion.  I was slightly indignant the card went astray as it had our full postcode on the envelope, but looking at that carefully I though the sender had probably written H as U.