The academic year is over. Time for recuperation, which for me means nursing gout,  turning off the mobile phone, only looking at e-mails painfully, reading a good book, and popping down to The Misty Mountain for breakfast. The Misty Mountain is excellent, for the regulars leave you alone because they want to be left alone, the landlord is gracious and only mentions the weather to make you feel at home, and it has big windows on the world (the High St). The mind drifts, ideas might surface. This morning's was an idea for a course titled 'HOW TO HATE THE ARCHITECTURAL ESTABLISHMENT'. Since I have almost a lifetime's experience of this it could be a winner.  

Novelist Patrick Hamilton is the subject of the book, great writer, repressed 1930's drunk- too much too young, biographer ill at ease talking about boozing, which of course is not necessarily boozing at all, just 'getting by' for many of us by now. Only disappointment with book; should have been written by an enthusiast rather than an evangelist. Deeply recommend to all his novel 'Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky'. Colleague said he couldn't cope with it because it was 'too real' but that is precisely it's strength, there is no redemptive quality in it at all, just fabulous description of our little lives.