These exclude:
- doing a big wash (have I really worn so many socks already this year?)
- doing my accounts (and recollections of stern lectures about the state of them until I finally twigged what one of the "extras" with my first Mac was for)
- tackling the window-boxes with only the haziest idea of what I'm doing (last year, the geraniums grew sideways afterwards)
- completing my tax declaration (the machine crashes, in OS 9, if I try to listen to listen to music and scan the pertinent documents simultaneously).
Taking on all these in one morning was lunacy, inspired only by a second day of sunshine so agreeable that I might even have launched into premature spring cleaning. "The bills have arrived and I've found no music..."; here's another of the (politer) variations.
But enough being enough, I felt I deserved to avoid cooking my lunch and to repair to what a handul of us know, with affection, as "the canteen":
On the left, the lights were on, as they are twice daily, 365 days a year, Elio was in the kitchen and served up 'the usual' with the usual Sunday extras and finesse. Any hope of catching up on remaining local gossip was dashed by the absence of most of the other habitués, leading the few of us left to conclude that either the remarkable weather had spurred on an early weekend exodus of Parisians or they they were still labouring over their tax forms. I gleaned merely that L'Entrepôt, the art cinema round the corner, has temporarily closed down, despite its latest facelift, "for security reasons." What were they showing recently?
Then Monsieur Baudier, elegant literary lion of le quartier,
made his appearance, inhabitually late at gone two o'clock, his tremendous mane of white hair ruffled by pulling over the universal practice of plumbers who never showed up when they promised they would. Once this gentle man's condition had been restored by a decent lunch from its frazzled peak to the normal low-level fretting, as he took his pen to a copy of 'Le Monde' to ring the latest causes of concern, I steeled myself for the bout of wordplay that is one of his favourite things.
We managed to steer mainly clear of politics: good going. M. Baudier, like me, will always find something to worry about at the quietest of times. He merely observed how northern hemisphere conflicts have tended to start in or after the summer, including World War II in September and World War I in July-August. I've no idea whether this is generally true, but when I pointed out that it's now the mois de Mars, we were still hard pressed to find anything offhand. Might that yet be reassuring?
Apart from plays and other writings which are noteworthy exercises in style as well as content, M. Baudier is also a dab hand at graphic design. He was intrigued (if appalled by some of the offerings published) to see that my own choice of reading, SVMMac, this month displays some of the more startling things you can do with a scanner. His own adventures with a photocopying machine never went further than the childish delight in mapping the lines of one's palm.
The kinds of things Katinka Matson and company, as well as Richard Schubert & Co., get up to with a flatbed would astonish him.
Outside, it's still lovely and just that kind of light. Time for a stroll. Perhaps I should take my camera. The power cord for the scanner's not long enough.
7:27:18 PM link 
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