And what a month or so that was.
Once upon a time this was a nearly daily blog about small happenings. That seems now to be as lost as the time I lose having discovered Spotify. Jigsaws on the internet were idleness enough. Now doing 2D jigsaws while listening to dodgy old 70s music I can't hear any other way is dubble dubble idleness. I never wanted to use the net as a mirror to ego but to try to describe the last month presents a bit of a challenge, one I have finally lost having spent my lunch hour at a book launch (not mine), drinking House of Lords champagne while talking to some charming novelists and a particularly interesting Islamic scholar who put me right on a few points of sharia law and Qur'anic scholarship.
Let me explain.
Having been involved in an ignoring competition with music for a couple of years, I have won a bit of a victory in the last few weeks, in which good ole gentle, warm music has come whispering back into my ear. Or rather, I have done a succession of different and very rewarding sessions, some for money and some not. It started with Comic Relief but continued through a number of other things. There is no accounting for these things. It is a bitter truth that all practitioners of popular music get better at it at roughly the same rate as people lose the desire to ask them to do it. Perhaps I have entered a brief sunny autumn of fun and enjoyment. after which the mellow evening of a once fierce noonday heat declines into an isolated winter. Whatever.
Notes to play again, most willingly plucked. But at the same time the buns are on the table again, for, quite unlooked for, I have been commissioned to write yet another book on Indian history. I wasn't even trying to pitch the idea when the editor I was talking to just told me to write it. This was not on the street but at the British Book Fair, which just happens to have an Indian theme this year. I have never been to anything like that in my life before. I played 'spot the author' because I assumed that the oddballs in weird hats not wearing official event tags were probably kooky writers. Quite a thing to behold. Listened to William Dalrymple read from his travel books. Am not a fan of his historical writing, although his travel books have an undoubtedly entertaining quality to them. They talk in the chronicles about the tented city that the Mughal emperors carried around with them, and I think the British Book Fair was a reasonable modern recreation. All life was there - lights, literature, poetry, talking and eating, the whole thing set up to conquer the world.
Meanwhile the fambly has had its ups and downs, with serious illness visiting a near relative, and even young Jake breaking his finger bouncing a basketball. Who weaponised those little globes then? My mother turned eighty and we had a lovely party in the middle of rural Oxfordshire. All life can sit around on shelves at a book fair, but it goes on all around us too, willy-nilly and without charging.
In sum, there seem to be so many people trying to tell us all about human experience, yet somehow it never runs out.