Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

I wonder how many Weekend Miscellanies I’ve done now?  It feels like nearly 100, but I daresay it isn’t that many yet.  I hope you’re still finding them useful – I know that I enjoy people’s round-up posts, and I also like being able to collect together bits and pieces rather than scattering them through the week.  This weekend I’ll be at work on Saturday, but not up to very much on Sunday.  I’m in a bit of a reader’s block at the moment – or, rather, reading a couple of books that I’m finding dull but have to finish – so perhaps I’ll indulge on Sunday and read something fun.  What are you up to?

1.) The link – if you happen to be in the Oxfordshire area at the end of June, why not go and see AA Milne’s brilliant play The Dover Road (PG Wodehouse’s favourite play, donchaknow) in Dorchester-upon-Thames?  More info here.  I’m hoping to go, if I can persuade some others.

2.) The blog post – if you’re not doing so already, you should follow Thomas on his tour around the UK.  He’s back in the US now, but is putting up glorious photo posts of his travels – he basically seems to have had the perfect trip (give or take potentially fatal car journeys) and has gone to many places I dream of visiting.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned on here that Thomas and I had cream tea at the Randolph whilst he was in Oxford – I daresay it will appear on his blog at some point, although we didn’t actually have a photo taken.  I met Thomas on his last visit, along with lots of other bloggers, but it was a real delight to have him to myself for a couple of hours.  I always get a bit nervous about these things, which either makes me very quiet or very voluble – well, just call me Garrulous Gary, because I chatted away animatedly all the way through, and Thomas did too.  It was so easy, and such fun.  We spoke surprisingly little about books (although we agreed to continue reading each other’s blogs, despite my dislike of Hotel du Lac and Thomas’s of Rebecca) – but we seemed to speak of many other topics under the sun.

3.) The book – I passed on my copy of Julie Myerson’s Then to my housemate Mel, who read it instantly (remember those days, of never having unread books on your shelf?) and tells me it is brilliant – and baffling.  Dystopia, amnesia, and hallucination were the words I grasped from the conversation – which sounds as though it could be enthralling, or could be a huge mess – sounds as though it’s the former.  Maybe one day I’ll have time to read it… thank you to Jonathan Cape for sending me a copy.  I’ll try to persuade Mel to write about it for me…