Take Off Your Running Shoes

Second hand Adele

Dove Grey Reader comes across Adele Geras's memoir in a second-hand bookshop. This is great, because now we all know about it, and can access a second-hand copy of Yesterday off Abe Books, or Amazon or wherever, but what surprised me was to hear that DGR and Adele have never met, because they are intertwined on the blogosphere, always commenting on each others' blogs and cross-referencing each other and so on - I thought they were old friends, but like some of the folk on this blog, they've only ever met in cyberspace.

I can't tell you how many bed-ridden days I bless this wireless age and its blogs for bringing the world and all its connections into individual bedrooms.

On Grief

...by Penelope Farmer here.

Normblog profile

Always wanted to answer one of these until Norm asked me to, and I realised I actually have no opinions, but, hey, I'm the Normblog profile this week! I am a real blogger now...

Granny P breaks cover...

....here

Welcome to my gang

Naomi Gryn on rabbis' daughters here.

Granny P

Granny P, one of this blog's premier friends, and author of the blog Rockpool in the Kitchen has outed herself as the novelist Penelope Farmer, after writing her online novel under a pseudonym. I read her books as a teenager and they have stayed with me. This song by The Cure was based on rock-chick Granny P's novel, Charlotte Sometimes, which you should read if it's passed you by.

Granny P

When you've finished sighing over how beautiful Granny P's kitchen is, you can read her online novel here.

The "L" stands for Linda!

All the people who read this blog, that I also walk down to the children's school with or otherwise meet during the day, are always wondering what the "L" in L. Lee Lowe stands for. L. Lee Lowe being the first and one of the most consistent posters of comments on this blog. So today I can reveal...it's Linda. And Granny P is Penelope.

The Third Dimension

I'm on my second Louette Harding novel, Women Like Us. "Oh please don't read those terrible books!" she said to me. "You know, I had an idea for one, and then I got tied into a contract to write three..." "They're fun," I said. "Why did you stop writing books?"

In fact, she hasn't stopped, and the next one, about Alzheimer's, is a work in progress. Her husband is a potter, and he sometimes does some therapeutic pottery with a group of Alzheimer's patients. When they work in three dimensions, Louette told me, Alzheimer's patients start remembering things their minds otherwise can't get round at all.

A riddle

Which socialite, Jewish, but converted to Islam, now converted to movie-starism, could be found some years back studying the tenets of the Hagannah, or other such basic Zionisms, in attendance at the lectures of one Colin Shindler: "My main areas of interest are the Israeli Right; history of Israel; Zionism and the Left; contemporary Israeli politics"...?

For those of us who know Colin, this is not only hilarious, but also probably means there's a Ralph Lauren connection in there somewhere.

*answer tomorrow....