As we're going out, Venera arrives with clean sheets and towels, all smiles. "Change!" Nice, but unfortunately the suspicion does arise that this unaccustomed promptness is not unconnected to hopes of a seasonal tip. This is the second change in two weeks, which would be normal elsewhere - but we were away for four nights last week. The difficulty about the tip is that the standard of service really doesn't warrant the encouragement, except that Venera is usually expected to do by herself the work of two people, which, naturally she does inadequately, and so a tip really becomes compensation for management's meanness. A little like the American taxpayer subsidising Walmart by providing food stamps to underpaid workers.
Stop at the charity shop after coffee, and stay a little longer than the quick look and chat as it starts to rain a bit. There's a local man in there making a nuisance of himself, seeming to wish to trade various odds and ends of clothing from plastic bags slung about his motor bike - jogging pants and such - for other acquisitions from the shop. This accompanied by interminable narratives about clothing. The proposed deals have a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't quality, and the woman in charge agrees mainly because, as she mouths to me, she just wants him to f_ck off. The two shop women and I wonder briefly if he's drunk, though J, undoubtedly rightly, says no. Unlike the man two flats down from us who came through reception yesterday (New Year's Day, NOT New Year's Eve) as pie eyed as anyone I've seen upright. And expressed the opinion, re the hot water supply, that the manager was doing his best. Couldn't decide whether this was meant ironically or not, and no doubt our response could have been taken either way as well.
Currently reading Love in Bloomsbury from the open library online. It's a book of the memoirs of Frances Partridge, the youngest member of the Bloomsbury set - Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, etc. She's an interesting and observant writer and her world was peopled with the artistic and literary lights of the early years of the 20th century. There are a number of volumes of her published diaries, with a tremendous time span, as she was born in 1900 and only died in 2004, a month before her 104th birthday, and with wits intact. Dates are sometimes a bit hard to pin down in Open Library books because, like Project Gutenberg's offerings, they've been digitally scanned, with some uneven results, particularly with numbers and punctuation. Hence "January 3rd igzS". 1925? (More entertaining in digitally scanned books are misreadings of adjacent letters, especially with non-standard fonts. Recent reported hilarity over scanner's rendering of "arms" as "anus" - leading a participant on Have I Got News for You to imagine lines such as "Let's lock anus(es) and sing Auld Lang Syne".)
Also reading, non-scanned, courtesy of the London Review of Books, excerpts from Alan Bennet's diary for 2014. A pleasure as always. Used to worry about running out of books (and one of my friends developed in youth the habit of reading slowly so as to make inadequate library resources last). Now, thanks in part to the internet, it's fairly obvious that hoarding is unnecessary. It's not books that will run out but life.