Hard work

If I were doing one of those books where you set yourself some pointless task and then write about it I would spend a year doing what the Guardian told me to. Reading that newspaper has become increasingly hard work. Every weekend there are supplements telling you to learn Portuguese, or set up a comprehensive exercise routine based on the workouts of Olympic athletes, or save something or other, or learn to play the piano. That's not even counting the main newspaper itself, which is full of things one's supposed to think or want. Currently they have a "1000 books everyone must read" supplement. This is just so pointlessly annoying. If they had called it "1000 books you might like" then I'd have collected the series of supplements and looked through them with interest. As it is each one just seems like an aggressive act, and all about setting you a checklist to fail against rather than actually about sharing some interesting book recommendations. If I were looking for reasons to feel bad about myself I would go to the sermons at St Andrew the Great's, which at least have the merit of some real moral basis. (I probably ought to do that, really.)

Still the comedy issue had a book called "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" in it, which I shall take with me to Kalamazoo, I think. It's still up in the air whether I will be going to the Newfoundland conference. I think it would be a waste of time and money. But then again there isn't much that I've done in the course of my life which doesn't arguably fall into that category. Heigh ho.

Still at least it's a relief to know that the Guardian approves of music streaming. I'm getting a bit confused about what it logically implies though. Recently I have mostly been listening to music via Spotify, and discovering new stuff, and occasionally indulging in nostalgia to old things like Ebenezer Goode and Frazier Chorus. I have been feeling very clever for making it work on my office computer. But now I'm back where I was a year or so ago, when I listened to lots of stuff on my ipod, but everything I had for playing music out loud wanted CDs, so that I either sat around at home with headphones on or I could only listen to stuff I could physically find, which was a very last century way to live. I sorted it out by getting ipod dock speakers to take to Italy, and now I only use those and have never bothered to unpack my hifi. But now I am back to the same situation where I have to listen to stuff at home with headphones on, because my laptop's speakers aren't any good. I might need to set up some AirPort streaming system. Technology is complicated and confusing. Suddenly my ipod looks all out-dated. Could we all just stop and catch our breaths?

West End Girls! Here it is on spotify.