You Should Have Gone Up

Here's another photogenic rail station from my walk on New Year's Eve. The modern station is located across the street from this one, which doesn't appear to be in use. The four posters on the doors are part of a public art project. They say "the person behind wants to talk to you," "ideally this poster would show you the way," "this poster saw you coming before you looked at him" and "you should have gone up."

I spent yesterday morning gardening and cleaning. I say "gardening" but really all I did was cut some plants back. I did some reading about avocados, and found that the variety I think we have is more cold-hardy than I thought. It's not the West Indian type that I grew up with in Florida, which is quite tender. It's a Guatemalan species that can handle chilly weather, being native to high altitudes in Central America. It would still suffer in particularly cold weather or snow, but that explains why it came through our recent cold spell with nary a wilted leaf. (Except the ones I managed to damage while covering it!) So I guess I don't need to be as paranoid about protecting it as I have been, which is good news.

I cut the yellow rose in our garden and brought it inside to brighten up the kitchen.

In the afternoon I read "The Bee Sting." I've hit a rough patch in this book. The story is told in the voices of several characters, and the sections narrated by the mother are written with minimal punctuation. There are apostrophes and question marks, but nothing else -- most crucially no periods. It is a nightmare to read, and it's a 165-page section of the book. And we return to her later in the narrative, too.

I was annoyed at first because it seemed utterly purposeless, but then I read in online reviews that it's meant to show the mother's lack of formal education and her manic mindset. I still think it's gimmicky and it's giving me a headache. I am dying to get back to the sections voiced by the other characters.

Speaking of books, how do we feel about the demise of TikTok in the United States? I don't use TikTok at all so I don't really have a horse in this race, especially being here in the UK. But I do wonder about its effect on book sales and the publishing industry. The "Book Tok" community on TikTok has turned some books into best-sellers, and without that marketing tool I suspect some authors will suffer.

Here's an architecture/planning fail on our high street. That building on the right is brand new, and when it was built, it was left with a sloping sidewalk in front. The slope is quite dramatic and, as you can see, someone (presumably the local council?) chose to erect unsightly barriers rather than have people walking on it. I guess they don't want people tumbling sideways into Five Guys.

I wonder how they're ever going to fix this and how it was allowed to happen in the first place. It's unfortunate because it's a very busy stretch of pavement and having such a big section blocked off is inconvenient, to say the least.