Errors

I went round to my parents’ house on Friday night, which was nice enough, particularly as I got to spend time with my nephew. He was as cute as ever and we sat and watched ‘Open Season’ and ‘Cars’ on DVD. At one point he walked over to my mum carrying his toy dog and knocked my mum’s cup of coffee on the floor. He looked at my mum and immediately said “It wasn’t me”, which I guess technically it wasn’t at it was the stuffed dog that had knocked it off the table, but I did say to my sister that it was good she was bringing up her son to take responsibility for his actions…

I finished reading “My Cousin Rachel” and really enjoyed that. Well worth reading. G and I actually had a really interesting conversation on Saturday about Daphne du Maurier’s books because I gave G a copy of Rebecca to read and we were discussing the role of the narrator in each of the books. The main character is the narrator in each and so you actually get this really biased view of what happens. I think that is particularly significant in how you read her books and also in how you interpret the events, so we were talking about that for ages – I shall return to this at some point soon because I find it really fascinating about the role of the narrator in how we understand and learn about things. I shall explain more another time, but it starts from the principle of when reading a book or listening to someone tell you an account of an event thinking about how objective that person is; and, how does their telling of the story affect your perception of it? G and I don’t normally have such intellectual conversations but it is something I have been thinking about of late. I did have to tell G one of my favourite lines from the book which was “I was so near, I could have tossed a biscuit at him”. That just really made me laugh, because it was such a bizarre way to explain how close someone was to you. I realise this will probably not be amusing to you at all though.

I have also been working on scanning a book for The Burgomeister and have scanned a quarter of The End of the Affair into Word and spent ages tidying it up and finding scanning mistakes and correcting them. If anyone wants me to send them a copy then drop me an e-mail and I can forward on what I have done so far and I’ll send on the other parts when I have done them. This would, of course, be so that you could point out any scanning errors to me (I would genuinely appreciate that help actually), but you would also have to read a mighty fine book in order to do this.