Back to the swimming pool today, it seems that once you’ve got the measure of the mile, even with 3-week gaps you can still jump in the water and do it again. It was a nice summery walk to the pool, you can see autumn in the trees but you can’t feel it yet. It’s as if the trees won’t wait for it to get cooler, it’s time to go brown and that’s what they’re going to do. At the pool, I walked into reception to find that since I went away they had taken down all the plastic Covid screens, it was somehow freeing to not have this barrier between you and the staff, and after all, it’s not a bank. I brought Twinings Earl Grey Tea 100s for the three reception ladies Vera, Tânia and Catarina, from Australia I brought them cherry ripes and violet crumbles, odd food for a place to get fit.

I talked to Sergio, one of the lifeguards, about Ariel and he sent me some links and addresses to junkyards in case we need to find parts. The insurers won’t bring her back and it seems we are stuck with fixing her there where labour is more expensive because getting her here to be fixed won’t be cheap either. We’re still hoping for some kind of compensation from the garage here because they sent us on our way with a full service and everything working, a week later we broke down.

I downloaded a whole lot of free classics onto the tablet today, Shakespeare to G. K. Chesterton, Zola to Sherlock, I’m trying everything I can to make the possibility of reading more of a reality. I like the 19th and 20th-century classics, English, European literature and some contemporary writers like Ian McEwan. I read a lot till the internet came along and filled up life, I need to find a way to get reading in there somewhere, the tablet may be the answer.

A sesh today with NJ Brian where we discussed album artwork, all the whys and wherefores of high res, 300dpi, all the possibilities and choices of gatefolds, inserts, inner sleeves, texture, where the credits and the titles go, pictures, label info. It’s a long way from the moment you find a melody to the finished record in your hand.

We watched The Rings of Power – Episode 6 over dinner, it was good, haha, what a relief. On the tablet, I was able to download the Lord of the Rings book. The last time I read it was sometime in the eighties, it’s a commitment, it’s around 1200 pages. Some history, The Hobbit was published in 1937 and over the next 17 years, Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings eventually publishing between 1954 and 1955 in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. Read it before you die.

Music today has been Nilsson’s third album Aerial Ballet (1968). It included Everybody’s Talkin’ (I posted this as part of the Fred Neil post the other day as Neil wrote it). It’s a true sixties classic, it’s another level of songwriting and singing. It also features another Nilsson classic, One. Hear it before you die.

Music Of the Daze