There is something rather erotic about watching a woman in a tent clad in nothing but a nightie and a pair of socks, rolling around trying to deflate a twinned pair of airbeds.
As we drove north over the Loire, the black clouds gathered and rain swept across the Autoroute. I heard the whispered message: England welcomes you back.
Sometimes when my back is sore, my muscles cramped from a cold draft or I'm simply stiff from a long drive, I fondly recall my T'ai Chi classes.
We studied back when we were in the States in 2002 and a few years subsequently on our return. Clare was never quite so taken with it.
The accusation that, like other non-contact martial arts, T'ai Chi is more a form of dance is hard to dismiss. To make it work as a martial art you surely would have to practice most days, most of the day, for years. Will never happen.
Some classes seemed to be a front for a Taoist sect; others an ego-trip for a cult-leader guru: all seemed entirely too reverential. And to perform the full exercise you need a fair amount of space - more than the average-sized living room.
Still, I miss it.
Note: I have now finished the book and my final thoughts are at the end.
"I'm 8% into China Mieville's new book 'Railsea'. It's a trademark Mieville world of Victorian heavy engineering manned by horny-handed proletarians. The world is densely-covered by train-tracks and points: trains are the equivalent of oceanic ships. All the characters have long, weird names and the hero is a boy apprenticed to become a doctor, tho' he knows it's not his true vocation.
The boy is on a train which hunts giant moles (they have an unusual name, like moldywarpes or something). There are plain echoes of 'Moby Dick'. The plot, if there is one, seems to be focussed around the mysterious mole-objective of the train captain, who is not called Ahab.
Mieville always writes beautifully, with inventive vocabulary and colouful turns of phrase. What he's missing (so far) is an engaging plot. I read out of duty, hoping that at some stage my interest will actually engage. 'Embassytown' was similar - lauded for its examination of the concepts underlying the use of language, but curiously uninvolving as a story.
Characterisation, descriptive writing and something to say are all vital ... but if you're in the business of fiction which entertains and turns the pages, you DO need plot."
Update Friday June 22nd.
Finally finished and view unchanged. Lots of 5-star reviews on the net reward Mieville's fine writing and beautifully-imagined setting. But I found the book uninvolving and shallow: a rather complex and tedious quest story with no deeper significance.
How to explain the difference to a class of 12 year olds, asks my teacher niece. She tears her hair out at confusing physics concepts.
Google describes average speed as total distance travelled over total time. Average velocity (a vector) is the resultant displacement vector divided by elapsed time. They are neither conceptually nor (often) arithmetically the same.
My niece is really struggling to find the best way to explain to her class the concepts of scalar and vector. In fact these concepts are anchored within the frameworks of linear algebra and vector calculus (studied at university).
In general, the meaning of any quality in physics is defined by the equations in which the quality participates: at school level the mathematical background just isn't there, so concepts all-too-frequently come across as arbitrary, badly-grounded and confusing.
I have a lot of sympathy with her.
