At 1.09am I made the first of several journeys to open the window and investigate the weather event. A rolling rain joined later by some rousing winds. The evidence they were rousing? They roused me to three further investigations. Scooby Doo has nothing on me.  The great thing about said weather event was it put paid to the ear drum blasting that had been going on for the previous seven hours.

Today however the hungover Halloween bangers continued. Who, at 12.19pm, on an average Monday has time and inclination to throw bangers (fire crackers) for more than an hour? Yesterday it felt the birds were dropping them. They land near your ankle, BANG, you take a stroke, and there’s no set of arms anywhere to indicate who threw them.

On the subject of .. yes they’re back again The Penguins. I discovered I’d missed a whole page in the NYRB article on The Great Penguin Rescue. I realized I’d missed it because I was discussing it at dinner with someone who’d also read it and raising the question of penguin nips and whether the volunteers had been nipped.  Yes he assured me they were nipped. I’d missed a whole page of the article! And boy were they nipped.  The piece also said the African penguin population has declined 95 percent.

Frances Boldereff is good company for insomnia. I turned to her correspondance after the Penguins and during the continued weathering. What a generous woman she was. Did she have an extra kidney full of generousity beans? How did she sustain this enthusiasm for the distant and negligibly interesting, in these snippets, O. I was trying to imagine a male doing likewise for a woman writer — one or two came to mind, and then I abruptly hit a blank. A highway of a blank.

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