We've just come back from the Bay where they use the apostrophe mainly to alert readers that an 's' is coming up at the end of the word, as in WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHEQUE'S or DRIVER'S WANTED.
It wasn't all that long ago that we prayed for rain; in recent months we prayed for the rain to stop, and today it did. We took the opportunity to clear the mailbox (two more books!), after which Padma shopped for groceries while I patiently waited to have my annual "Lebensnachweis" (proof of life) certified by Centrelink to continue to receive my German pension of €109.04 a month. Then we went to our favourite Sawatdee Thai Restaurant to spend most of it on a delicious lunch.
I'm sitting again by the electric heater (it's all too much bother to light the fireplace), studiously ignoring the sharemarket which has been dropping like a stone since mid-June (it's all relative as I'm still far ahead of were I was this time four years ago, after I had just come through a life-threatening cancer operation and money had been the last thing on my mind), and trying to decide which book to start on.
My choices are Nick Bryant's "When America Stopped Being Great - A History of the Present", "Black Dragon River - A Journey down the Amur River at the borderlands of Empires" by Dominic Ziegler, Deborah Moggach's "Tulip Fever" (which was also made into a movie), and another gripping geopolitical guide to the modern world by that leading authority on foreign affairs, Tim Marshall, "The Power of Geography - Ten Maps that reveal the Future of the World".
It's always good to be back at peaceful "Riverbend" where life goes on as if nothing is going on.
