Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

I’m going to be spending my weekend doing some painting, I think (of the still life variety, rather than the walls-and-ceiling variety), but before I get out my brushes, here’s a weekend miscellany…

1.) The blog post – is a delight of a poem on Kate Macdonald’s blog. It’s ‘The Plaint of the Middlebrow Novelist’ by Phoebe Fenwick Gaye, and will ring true to any of us immersed in the middlebrow world.

2.) The link – is a YouTube video of a documentary from a few years back called Twincredibles. I believe the title here is in Hungarian, but that’s only because it’s the only version I could find… c’mon, BBC, update your archives. It was part of a ‘Mixed Race Season’ that they did, and looks at several sets of mixed race twins who have very different skin tones. The thing I find strangest about some of these pairs, though (particularly Daniel and James) is how little they seem to get on. I can’t imagine a twin not being the most important person in your life.

3.) The books – I went to the Oxfam bookshop near my work the other day, with my colleague and friend Kirsty, and picked up a couple of books I know nothing about. (I also revelled in the fact that she bought four; it’s rare that I’m out-booked by a fellow shopper.) Has anybody read I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson or The Wrong Box by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne? I bought the former because I’ve vaguely meant to read him for ages, and the latter… for the amusing cover.