Back from Point Reyes

Spent a delightful week eating oysters, drinking Russian River sour beer, and taking long walks in the country with Mrs. Tulkinghorn and Tulk Jr. Also read most of the new A.S. Byatt novel "The Children's Book" (coming soon to a bookstore near you), which is about life among hip Edwardians, complete with exegesis on cabaret, pottery, Fabianism, and puppetry. Something like twenty main characters in three families over about thirty years. Galsworthian and goes down easy.

I enjoy not working.

I also enjoyed the following snippet of wisdom in Adam Roberts' reaction to the latest Harry Potter movie. (I read a Roberts novel about Soviet science fiction writers and the multiverse. Literate, funny, and dull. Oh, well.) If only I had understood this when young and single.....

I found two particular pleasures in the film.

One is Ron Weasley, as played by Rupert Grint, now a gulp-inducing twenty-one years of age. The plot calls for various girls to fall desperately in love with Ron, Hermione (of course) chief amongst them; and there is exquisite irony-flavoured viewing pleasure in this, given that Ron has grown from a sweet carrot-top kid into an adult of gasp-and-point ugliness. If the Tollund Man had been dug up, electrically reanimated and given an orange wig he would barely look less physically prepossessing than Grint in this role. Of course the girls all love him. How could they not?