My computer just restarted itself several times in a row, off its own bat, while I was in the middle of typing an email! How rude! When it is restarting, it makes a strange whirring/fizzing noise like a moth being steadily shredded on a scythe-edged wheel. (No, it's just like that - really - I have heard lots of moths being dismembered in this ( Read more... )

And talking of Japan, gassulaviya and I watched Howl's Moving Castle last week and it was SPLENDID, and made my leg rise of its own accord.

I did it! - I booked the ticket! Went directly via Air France in the end which was by far the cheapest without being actually cheap by any stretch of the imagination. Am now having a slight money panic as almost simultaneously with this massive expenditure, a question has arisen over my most lucrative translation work, the question being: why ( Read more... )

I'm looking for cheap flights on the internet, and I'm wondering: how on earth do you tell if a particular travel agent is reputable? I mean, there are websites suggesting to me that they may be able to get me an incredibly cheap flight to Japan if I ring up their freephone number, but how do I know that they won't vanish off the face of the earth ( Read more... )

...that would be over 3 times the size of helvellyn, then. Depending of course on how far above sea level you are to start with.

...I'm going to Japan!!!! I'm going to climb Mt Fuji!!!!

I will be spending most of my time from now on learning Japanese/taking vertical sort of exercise (How big is it anyway?)

Five Red Herrings - Dorothy Sayers [missed out on previous occasion]
Up and Down in the Dales - Gervase Phinn [audiobook]
Coram Boy - Jamila Gavin
Beaver Towers - Nigel Hinton
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
In the Hand of the Goddess - Tamora Pierce
The Idler 37: Childish Things [most of it, except the boring bits]
The Lost Art of Keeping ( Read more... )

I think the plant is a yucca gloriosa nobilis which means that soon it will do this. There aren't many photos of plants at the phallic stage and I don't have a digital camera, but it looks a little bit like the picture on the right here although the one pictured is a different species of yucca and ours is much more phallic.

Argh. I have to tidy my room so it looks like a tidy, sane, lovely person lives in it, and instead I have an enormous urge to cut things up and make collages out of them based on my dreams. Including the curtains, if necessary. Failing that, I feel an unnecessarily strong pull towards sitting in front of my computer twitching slightly and not ( Read more... )

Having lived in Paris unfits you for living anywhere, including Paris.
- John Ashbery, quoted in The Last Avant-Garde by David Lehman and subsequently in The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White