A Noisy Monday

We had a noisy Monday around here, with the Russians purging stuff from their flat and Mrs. Kravitz next door berating her lawn crew. She had two guys trimming, mowing and power-washing all day, and she gives orders at top volume (admittedly necessary with all that machinery running). If she believes they have not been followed, we hear the fallout. I'm glad I don't work for her.

In the afternoon, Mrs. Russia put a beautiful blooming orchid in a pot on the front porch next to a black bag full of trash. I thought, "She's going to throw that out." I waited until it disappeared from the porch, and I looked in the rubbish bins -- and sure enough, the orchid was there, its flowers cut off. I retrieved it from the trash and brought it inside. I'm tempted to put it in the front window so she can see I salvaged it, which would piss her off. But that's just me being small.

I finished "All the President's Men," which I'm so glad I read. And while walking Olga on the high street Sunday morning, I passed a closed charity shop with a stack of vintage paperbacks in the window, for sale at £1 each. One of them was gay author John Rechy's "City of Night," which I've never read -- it's a scandalous novel from 1963 about the "tawdry, deviate world of Times Square (and) Hollywood Boulevard," a "perceptive, compelling journey through the sordid limbo of hidden sex between men" (according to the back cover). Whoa! It was touted by James Baldwin as "a most humbling and liberating achievement." So I went back to the shop after it opened and bought it. Maybe I'll read it for Pride month.

It's one of those old-fashioned paperbacks from the '60s with red-edged pages and tiny, tiny print -- the first paperback edition, dated 1964, from Grove Press. It doesn't look like it's ever been read. Kind of an unexpected book to find in a West Hampstead charity shop.

In the afternoon I also sorted out a banking question that's too boring to go into here. It took an hour or two but I'm so relieved I figured it out and it should give us a financial boost.

To celebrate, I made myself an evening martini and sat out in the garden as Olga snoozed on the grass nearby. By this time the trimming and purging had ceased and all was peaceful. I watered all our plants thoroughly because they were looking so parched, and I see now that we got rain overnight -- so they've been doubly blessed.