pumpkinstrokemarrow

I had been almost free of senior moments in recent weeks, at least the sort that one notices, perhaps because of the change to my diet, with much lower intake of alcohol and vegetable fibre. Then over the last couple of days, three of the things.

The first took place in the extension, a place where I quite often go, either to place a full memory stick in its place or a washed wine glass in its. On this occasion, for the first time ever, I made a serious attempt to put a wine glass in the memory stick place, to the point where it had more or less got there before the brain went into reverse. This is the sort of thing that used to happen quite often in the kitchen, but never before in the extension. The second took place while I was consuming email, this particular email containing the word 'drs'. The brain locked onto the notion that drs was initials for either somebody or something, perhaps digital resource system, which used to be sold to government by the company formerly known as ICL, with the result that I completely failed to work out that it was simply an abbreviation for 'doctors'. And even when this had been explained to me, it still took a few moments to work out what exactly was going on. The third was a visual error. I was looking out over the back garden, admiring the wind in the left hand hazel nut tree. I looked away, thinking about something else, then looked back to find that a lot of the leaves on the tree had taken on a very pale hue. Was this some trick of the dawn light? After about a minute or so I realised I had locked onto a shrub near the hazel tree: the front end of the sight system had shifted from one tree to another while the back end had stayed put. Most odd.

I can also report the demise of the last three inches of pink sausage. Following the macaroni of on or about May 30th, went for an upgrade yesterday and replaced the dried basil by fresh basil plus diced pink sausage. Let the whole lot stand for a few minutes while the pink sausage warms through - no need to actually cook the stuff again - and serve. Very good it was too. I learned that fresh basil - which I had not cooked with before - smells rather like fresh mint. Also that it is not just gluten free macaroni which soaks up lots of heat. Even the ordinary stuff must have a very high specific heat as one has to have the heat turned well up to keep the ambient water boiling, far higher than one would for say for a similar quantity of rice or crinkly cabbage.

And then there are the tales from the kindle. I was finding the rather tatty formatting for kindle that comes for free from the Gutenburg people (http://www.gutenberg.org/) rather irritating, the particular case being 'Ivanhoe'. Furthermore, it had been alleged that if you buy a real kindle book things are not that much better, so I resolved on a further test and actually bought a kindle book, selected from the fiction pages of the TLS ('The Flame Alphabet' by Ben Marcus) and bought with a single click from Amazon. Well, one click after I had fought my way through the new-to-me search in the kindle part of Amazon which is quite different from the search in the other part, which I am used too. So far, in addition to the text itself, I have discovered a table of contents from which one can jump to a selected position in the book. So Amazon are doing something to adapt a book for a kindle. Maybe there will be other wheezes which my first foray did not come across.

All an expense of course. Presumably publishers are well on top of turning a word processor manuscript into a decent looking paper book but are only just starting out on the business of turning such a manuscript into as decent looking kindle book - a business which my admittedly limited experience with desk top publishing packages suggests might take a while.