Monday, January 5/2015

Pride goes before a rainfall. Not unexpected, because we've been watching the storms moving east along the Mediterranean for days now. But we wake to rain driving almost horizontally against the glass doors to the balcony and darkened skies with silhouetted palm trees whipping around like televised clips of a Caribbean hurricane. A good indoor day. Make stuffed peppers and read books. Current read alouds are an Ian Rankin and Sir John Colville's The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries, 1939 to 1955. Colville had the interesting position of being an assistant secretary to Chamberlain and then private secretary to Churchill, Atlee, and the queen, consecutively. And he writes well. He confesses to having removed mundane daily details but says he has left unaltered opinions with which he later disagreed.