Sunday 28th Jan

a sausage-like draught excluder for the front room is arriving today £25 from Karleen's Prime.

At midnight drank my prescribed orange flavoured Cosmocol sachet with sparkling water and a dash of gin.

We've finished Martina Cole's Runaway, a brick of a book at 729 pages. Cathy's face is ruined but her brain is undamaged after many months in a coma.She and the unorthodox Detective Inspector Richard Gates have found each other. They 'll surely be lovers when she's ready to leave hospital; and she's also got her daughter Kitty and good friend Desrae , , , 

perhaps to be continued . . . 

Inspired by Jonathan Meades . . .

in his Museum Without Walls".

     So this is the thing. I love to write, with fountain pen or keyboard. I keep dozens of notebooks as journals: to record the banal details of my day and often night too. I agree with Meades that everywhere is interesting. I'm never bored of walking the same streets and paths through High Wycombe, whether for practical reasons, or simply the exercise. After my spinal op for Cauda Equina, I can walk miles to strengthen my muscles, and it's a joy to have received free from the NHS a special walker, which I call my Roadrunner, as it's so quick and manoeuvrable.

     Anyway, here's something I wrote in bed this morning, before Karleen brought up tea for us both and biscuits for me—I eat small and often, at interval in the day and night, it's feature of the spinal thing to have compressed my stomach.

"I think it will suit me to live a life of austerity, one that feels natural to my age and health. Or as they used to say in the Boy Scouts "clean in thought, word and deed." But the definition of clean is according to my own definition, that whatever I do is done consciously and deliberately and not something I'd want to renounce or distance myself from later. This way I grow in "spiritual strength". In quotes because in my youth I was into Zen, particularly this book.

I got my original copy in Paris, 1962, heavily dog-eared, but the pages never fell out—they have proper bindings, not glued. I thought that Buddhism was the thing, particularly Zen was the thing. I remember a triumphant phrase from somewhere:

J'ai écrasé la caverne des fantômes

which I translate as 

 I've blown the ghosts out of my skull

 However there's nothing like it on Google, which we all assume knows everything

The Principle of Least Effort

The principle of least effort is a broad theory that covers diverse fields from evolutionary biology to webpage design. It postulates that animals, people, even well designed machines will naturally choose the path of least resistance or "effort". This is perhaps best known or at least documented among researchers in the field of library and information science. Their principle states that an information seeking client will tend to use the most convenient search method, in the least exacting mode available. Information seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found. This theory holds true regardless of the user's proficiency as a searcher, or their level of subject expertise. The principle of least effort is analogous to the path of least resistance. The principle was studied by linguist George Kingsley Zipf, author of this classic treatment of the subject. He theorized that the distribution of word use was due to the tendency to communicate efficiently with least effort and this theory is known as Zipf's Law.

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul

This book is my favourite among all the novels and real-life adventures of Douglas Adams. The title is a parody of a book by St John of the Cross,much favoured by Catholic mystics. Here's how it begins: 

 INTO this dark night souls begin to enter when God draws them forth from the state of beginners—which is the state of those that meditate on the spiritual road—and begins to set them in the state of progressives—which is that of those who are already contemplatives—to the end that, after passing through it, they may arrive at the state of the perfect, which is that of the Divine union of the soul with God. 

The best way to introduce it is to set forth the main characters, in order of appearance, as follows:

• Kate Schechter, an American queuing for a ticket to Norway to see her boyfriend
• a large imperious man in front of demanding a ticket to Oslo. He has no credit card, nor, as it turns out, a passport. He gets angry, bangs the checkout desk and  a second later, it explodes.  He can do this tu

 

Much of it sticks in memory.I'll occasionally quote from Adams' book but describe its highlights from memory. Its hero, in the original sense of main character, is Dirk Gently who runs his Holistic Detective Agency. He lacks the deductive skill of Holmes, relying instead on a gift of clairvoyance, accidentally discovered when he was at college. He dropped out and advertises an uncanny skill at returning lost cats to elderly ladies who rewarded him handsomely for their return. More lucrative still is his ability to provide protection for clients involved in a shady criminal world. He can get them out of the way when danger looms. We first meet him snoring in his dingly London flat. Doesn't respond to a phone call at 11pm, nor at 6.50 the following morning and again at ever decreasing intervals, till it stops. His awakening is triggered by the need for a cigarette

T