Things I haven’t done:
1. Read Moby Dick (has anyone?)
2. Read Proust (h a ?)
3. Watched Line of Duty
Things I have done:
1. Attended a football match (twice); Middlesbrough and Chelsea both home games. When ICI was a client they were surprised that a city slicker like me had been standing in the shed at Middlesbrough.
2. Spent many hours in a cell in Chelsea police station before I was transferred to the officers’ mess at Chelsea barracks.
3. Went by tube and train from Barons Court to Shanghai via Cologne, Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing; something that came up with the Russian woman next to me in the socially distanced queue for a jab. She had been on the Moscow to Vladivostok line. As I get older I cannot resist chatting to strangers.
I’m well-happy that more people watched the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral than Line of Duty, a title appropriate to HRH Prince Philip.
Meanwhile I am reading about the relationship between the United States and Britain in the Second World War; ground that I have travelled over before but nevertheless a fresh perspective and relevant today, as the United States Secretary of State meets the UK’s Foreign Secretary in London. The “special relationship” is stale terminology but I like to think that US likes to chat with UK. Indeed I hope Dominic Raab was singing along with Dusty Springfield.
Yes, yes, and sort of. My wife recently watched a few seasons of Line of Duty. I thought it all but hallucinatory, with a couple of seasons starting by men with automatic rifles ambushing police convoys. The level of violence appears Sinaloan rather than British.
(And for the second Yes, I should specify that I did not read it in French, but rather in–as Evelyn Waugh put it–Scottish.