often seen in the street without a hat

Today partner and I did make it through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered (actually, 2 Tubes, 1 Overground, and a walk through Belair Park) to Dulwich Picture Gallery for the Tirzah Garwood exhibition.

Also a certain amount of queuing even if we had timed entry tickets, as due possibly to the way things were laid out there was a certain amount of clumping up around the early parts of the exhibition.

But really rather good - got the impression that Garwood was an artist who was having fun with her art rather than Suffering For It, as well as, like so many female artists of her day, working in a whole range of media and crafts. E.g. her work on marbled paper seems to have been a significant contribution to the family income at certain points. Also did embroidery, quilting, collages, etc and there's a lot of playfulness to her work. Though also I found a number of her 'house' pictures verging on the unheimlich (a certain Shirley Jackson-esque note?)

Did a fairly quick walk round the rest of the gallery after we'd done the exhibition (not our first visit) and then home by a different route - the other Dulwich station, Overground plus Tube. Nostalgia of train passing through vistas of South London.

Pillion review – 50 shades of BDSM Wallace and Gromit in brilliant Bromley biker romance (Peter Bradshaw in Cannes, you have been warned).

But, anyway:

Soon Ray is requiring the gigglingly thrilled Colin to cook and clean and shop for him (though of course never permitted touch his motorbike) and sleep on the floor like a dog at his bland house in Chislehurst*

Safeword for unbearable ponceyness, no?

*CHISLEHURST!!!, the subtle connotations of which I have previously discussed.

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Let me cleanse the timeline with this adorable story about saving the Welsh watervole by making its poo glittery: Endangered water voles in Wales are being fed edible glitter in a bid to save them from extinction:

The hope is that if the water voles are willing to consume the glitter then it will come out in their poo, allowing the small mammals - which are often mistaken for brown rats - to be tracked by conservationists.
Different colours of glitter could be used to allow conservationists to track different families of water voles and how far they range.

Is it ethical to buy used books and music instead of new copies that will financially reward the author or artist?

Okay, perhaps the writer of the query means, books that are currently available new but you are able to score a used copy in the local Oxfam shop or whatever - maybe.

(Which of course raises another effikle q that in that case it is For A Good Cause....)

And as someone who has spent years hunting down works which were not in print, or were only reprinted by Virago or the British Library or whatever after I had acquired my collection after arduous searches and considerable expense, or, finally, can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg or the Faded Page -

Hollo larfter.

True, I have also bought copies of works which I probably could have acquired shiny new, but was not entirely sure whether they were for me, taking a punt on something I had heard of, etc etc. And sometimes this led to me buying up everything the author ever wrote, their backlist, preordering their forthcoming, and so on. In hardback.

Plus, while I was appalled at those people who were buying books on Amazon and then returning them and getting their money back, and also at book piracy, on the whole I don't think it is the end-user, the actual reader, who is the greatest villain facing authors, rather than the publishing industry.

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In other book-related news, yesterday I was still feeling the effects of a couple of bad nights with lower-back flare-up and did that thing of doing some small tedious task which has been lingering about for, lo, a very long time.

Transferring my FREE PDFs of Open Access academic books to my tablet (and also sorting out the file titles to be something a bit more helpful than a truncated ISBN) so I can, should I be moved to do so, actually read them. Some of them are things that yes, I should read, and others are more, er, aspirational.

I also, whilst faffing around with my tablet, finally got the issue with Princeton UP's annoying walled-garden app sorted. So maybe I can finally get to the books I bought in their sale nearly a year ago.