Why do I read Peter Ackroyd? Why? He gives me the fantods. But I keep on reading him, as I do not keep on reading Chatwin's equally fantoddy Viceroy of Ouidah. The 80s were very good to me but I look back on its literature, the stuff I read then and mostly in Picador, and have claustrophobic attacks.

Equally Kate Elliott posts a picture of Salisbury Plain. Which makes me understand, even more than the Niagara Peninsula, Auden's prayer:

I cannot see a plain without a shudder,
'Oh God, please, please don't ever make me live there.

More happily, a Star reporter talks about learning to ride a bicycle at age 23. I was 29 and thought that an achievement; I also had an easier time. Start by riding on grass? or worse, Queen St? Lord no. School playground on the weekend, third try. Friend held the handlebars till I had my feet on the pedals, let me go, and suddenly I was bicycling. (I didn't learn as a kid because my mom was convinced that to ride a bike was to die. Even if my dad had got his way and tried to teach us, I'd have been like the reporter: fall off once, forget it.)

But my hat is off to the Toronto Councillor who learned at 45. Go him.