talents

I think I am perhaps most talented at being on holiday. The early, but inactive rising, the favourite and foreign books savoured over tea with milk and sugar, the late bath and simmer over more words, once in a while a stroll in the town resulting in a lazy lunch of dim sum in the square overlooking the hulking modern cinema, and a thoughtless tram ride home with some small slippery shopping bag between one's feet.

Of course, these last days were not so simple: Danmark proves a more hearty and adventurous environment. I hope I shall never forget our happy trooping through the snowy wood of slender non-perennial heights. It was pure magic out of a wardrobe and I wished and wished I'd had a pair of those old-fashioned langlaufen skis with hand lathe-turned poles to match.

My heart, however gladdened by the trek to the land of rich pastries and beautiful, expensively hand-made things, now needs a few days of water and black bread and cold lettuce to recover from the feasting and marching in razoring climes.

Mr. Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" is such a complete novel, even halfway through, or a paragraph through. Ms. Woolf's "Orlando"'s charm wears at the end, but overall was just the leap away from the hard and fast things of daily toil that I have since quite sufficiently recovered from pedestrian life in California.

For the new quarter: driving lessons, more kindly terrorising of students of Modern Chinese, and wushu again to drive away bodily inertia (though relentless combing of Copenhagen in -3 degree gales did revive the stony legs some).