Monday, still on holiday, still the sun puts in an appearance and still I do not get a good nights sleep. So its a bed, sofa, bed combination night again. Again I get up early and read. I read until I finish the The Kiss of the Spider Woman. Its a while since I read a book that actually comes to its conclusion with the words “The End”. I know this is one of those books that is going to hang around” for quite a while, I’ve already started to have ideas about it. Not until my partner gets up do we eat breakfast and plan the day. We prepare our shopping list and head out to the local bakery and the general store. We return to the apartment, stow the food and settle down on the balcony to read the paper, do puzzles and for the first time in a long time jot a few notes. For what they are worth here they are:

I like to think that I can learn something when I am holiday, so I thought I would keep a note of what I’ve learnt so far. This is day three of the holiday and so far its been productive. Firstly I’ve learnt that I do not sleep well in a normal size double bed when it is hot. This is exacerbated by the hot flushes induced by my anti-cancer drugs. I am condemned to a menopausal type flushing till the day I die. I think this has increased my personal space perimeter to that of a football pitch. So no matter how knackered  I am at the point of retiring I fail to sleep for a long time until I finally drift off only to wake up quickly after and needing to decamp to a sofa. Here I doze for a while before trying to return to the bed. The outcome is that I get up early and read, which is a mixed blessing.

This brings me to my second learning. I should not read crime thrillers and who done it books. Having spent my life in the criminal justice system and in particular working in therapeutic communities with hundreds murders and the like I have a head full of lifes extreme inhumanity that humanity is capable of. The result is that the made up stuff is what it is, namely contrived. Sometimes its thoughtfully contrived and plausible, usually when kept simple, other times it’s just a hotchpotch of ill-informed pseudo psychological nonsense. There is a running joke in the family that I always know who’s done it before the end of whatever film or series we are watching. Its simple really these are forms of entertainment and of course have to be written in such a way as to be clever or entertaining. There are assumed rules to that, once you know the rules it becomes easy to see through. The reality of murder and serious crime is far more prosaic and human than the entertainment business would have us believe.  

Thirdly I have found that reading some book is exhausting. Not because the physical effort of reading them but the aftermath of them. There are those books that niggle at you and stay with you. In odd moments traces of them come back vividly and pose a question or prise open a door that you think you had bolted tight on the inside. The Cat That Saved Books was one of those but the most recent is the one I finished this morning, The Kiss of the Spider Woman. It is a book full of challenge and with a current of long academic footnotes that act as an invitation to thought along the way. In the narrative the psychological theory (now old and replaced by more rational thought) is played out in a relationship. Perhaps it appeals to me is the setting as it is a prison cell. Perhaps it was the broken night sleep, but once I had finished the book I was instantly tired and knew this was one of those books that will stay with me. Relationships in confined space have of course been a large part of my life, however mine have always been spaces with an intention, the searching and making of new meaning, new personal universes. It is the “normal” confinement of relationships that creates the journeys and universes that everyone lives in daily. Here are the greatest perils, the roots of what makes some books exhausting to read, or rather to live with afterwards.

Fourthly I’ve discovered that when I run out of books, I compulsively write. Either stuff like the above, the blog, letters, and poetry. It would seem that after a life time of trying to understand and make meaning that it is not something I can turn off.

Lunch time arrives as does the hottest part of the day. Its fat rascal time and a cool drink before we prepare to walk the beach. With a bag on my back we walk the length of the beach as the tide comes in. On our return we run out of sand and are forced to climb over the pebble ridge by the lifeguard station and walk back along the burrows behind the pebble ridge that runs the length of he beach. We get back to the main resort are and buy ice crams which we at while sitting on the “village” green. We watch a bunch of adolescence being adolescents, a couple smoking but most of the others vaping. It seems to be a big ting amongst them. They are obviously visiting for the day and like a flock of seagulls rush off together to get on their bus. The leave a load of crap behind, empty cans, bottles and wrappers. We watch and pick out the ones whose futures are already etched in there behaviours. We finish our ice creams and wander off to find postcards. The choice is not great and we end up going back to the “arty” shop to get the best variety before returning to the apartment. Here we indulge in cooled drinks and I retreat to the shady bedroom to draft the blog and fulfil my promise to include the treasures we found on the beach, our version of Caligula raiding Neptune’s palace.

So it is now evening and still hot, there will be pasties for tea and football tonight. Best of all a new sunset to admire and perhaps inspiration to be had. Football: England 8 Norway 0. I put off going to bed as long as possible in the hope that I will fall asleep tonight.