Heath Dog

Yesterday, after completing miscellaneous household tasks -- like trimming the garden, lugging two huge newly delivered bags of garden compost from the foyer to the garden shed, and repotting the spider plant that one of Dave's students gave him -- we got ambitious. We decided to take Olga to Hampstead Heath.

I don't think I've been to the Heath with Olga since last February, because it's a long way for her these days. But we could take the train and walk slowly, and that's what we did -- and she managed just fine.

We found some tedious-looking old books set out on someone's garden wall. I told Dave they looked like the bookshelf of Ross from "Friends" (who was supposedly a nerdy paleontologist, even though he obviously went to the gym about five times a week). Surprisingly, two of them were gone when we passed again a few hours later.

We walked up Parliament Hill, where I insisted on taking a family selfie. After all, it's not often I have both Dave and Olga with me. I said, "We have to prove we were all here!" Dave said, "Who do we have to prove it to?" "Ourselves!" I replied.

We walked down the far side of Parliament Hill to the ponds, where we found a wading spot for Olga the water-dog. Then we made our way back to the train.

Yesterday was the first day of the Notting Hill Carnival, which is always a spectacle, attracting something like a million spectators to the streets of Notting Hill in West London. We didn't go, obviously -- we saw enough when we lived above the parade route -- but we could faintly hear the distant music even on the Heath. I detected snippets of sound in our garden, too. The carnival continues today.

Yesterday morning I finished "To Battersea Park." The last part proved as enigmatic as the first three parts, blurring the line between fact and fiction, the pedestrian and the fantastic -- but the writer, Philip Hensher, included a passage that I think explained everything:

A sentence from a novel: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to see the ice. The novel and the art it embodied, both in those who wrote them and those who read them, was an interlacing of the truth and the invented. What happened passed before the eyes, and it was drab, monosyllabic, solipsistic, inadequate once transcribed; what might have happened stretched out limitlessly, rooted in and always returning to what had been seen.

The nod to Gabriel Garcia Marquez acknowledges Hensher's debt to magical realism. That "interlacing of the truth and the invented" definitely captures the spirit of the book. I liked it a lot.

Finally, last night, Dave and I sorted out our Christmas plans. We were toying with going back to Pevensey Bay, where we spent last Christmas, but "our" cabin wasn't available that week and besides, Pevensey is a bit far with the dog and the pebbly beach is not easy on her feet. So we opted instead for Whitstable, which is closer to London and has a sandy shore. We found a waterfront cabin that looks very colorful and promising and we're excited to try someplace new!