Staying indoors

There's just no appeal to it out there. It's grey and it's cold and the rain is spitting in faces, and it doesn't even feel fresh, just spent.
So far in January I have read three books, I think.
1. Lighthouse, Tony Parker talking to lighthouse keepers, gave me plenty of lovely imaginings and suggested it might be a lifestyle I could get used to (apart from the boat travel and all that brass-cleaning)
2. What mothers do, Naomi Stadlen, a lovely little book which is really all just about the relationship between a mother and her new baby, and how much meaningful work is done in the first few months as the mother learns to read her child. It made me want Denzil to get a move on.
3. Annie's coming out (Crossley and McDonald), a fascinating Pelican about a teenager with cerebral palsy which gave her such physical difficulties that it was assumed (by the institution she'd been in since the age of three) that she was mentally incapable. Rosie, employed as an assistant in the institution, discovered that Annie had highly developed mental functionings and worked on building up ways that she could communicate these with the world, culminating in a court case where Annie demanded her right to be allowed to leave the institution. Fascinating and disturbing and the sort of thing you hope doesn't still happen.

I'm still moving on with War and Peace, which is regularly staggering me into silence. When you read Tolstoy's accounts of how a war was not down to big decisions of the leaders but individual actions motivated by human weakness, it first makes you look sadly at the world and second leads you to ask what the point is in ever trying to write anything if you can't write like that.

This weekend there will be some more reading, and a proper launch of Project Clothe The Baby, just as soon as I've decided on some patterns.