Another long weekend, and if it seems we only just had a long weekend, I need to remind myself that back in early July I was coughing and sneezing and miserable with allergies. Seems an age since that happened, now that it begins to happen again. These respites are never as long as I think they are. And of course now I discover that most antihistamines are anticholinergic , meaning they're linked to cognitive impairment. Also dementia, but I'll take my chances on that. Mental fuzz OTOH is what I could do without.

That being the case, I probably shouldn't be reading a mouldy copy of Ruth Rendell's The Speaker of Mandarin. But my SFF reads are all door stoppers and I wanted something portable. Began with a couple of slim volumes, Emmanuel Bove's My Friends and Charles Williams' All Hallows Eve, which I read in my 20s, restarted ten years ago, and somehow never got far with. Dropped the first after three pages, because the unlikable narrator *has* to comment on the breasts of every woman he meets. Dropped the second after three chapters when I ran into the hair-raising Christian-based anti-semitic plot point that somehow went over my head 40 years back. So Rendell it is.

Am at an increasing loose end. Think I must go and spend a chunk of money on something like a new bicycle or a cleaning service, just to assert my existence.