Slow down, honey

Sometimes, I am not very good at reading. I have all sorts of strategies for blaming this on things: the internet, ebooks, the half-painted bathroom, the attendant mess in the living room, work, coffee, S. (sorry, S.), TV. I don’t blame records, of course – it’s the other way around, books take the flak for not leaving enough time for listening. S. aside, you will have noticed that the common theme here is flitting, distraction, the scarcity of time. It makes me think again about slow blogging, whether it is just reactionary or whether there is a point there. It makes me think of Drugstore’s song ‘Accelerate’, and the drawled, dread-filled line ‘slow down, honey’; and this makes me think how brilliant it is that Drugstore are back!, back!!!, etc. Thanks to Unpopular for the alert, I don’t think I read about it anywhere else. I had a plan to read Walter Scott’s Waverley followed by Unpopular / Alistair’s Big Flame, because it uses Brogues’ Waverley steamer pen on the cover (I can’t find the link, but I think that’s right). Then Waverley began to seem like a chore... and I’m not saying it is, necessarily, but one week its digressions and meandering seemed quixotic and charming, the next infuriating. Roughly coinciding with the first appearance of poetry, which is a dead giveaway that my impatience is the key factor here, not the quality of the book.

The perfect antidote to all this nineteenth vs. twenty-first century fretting is the new LP by The A-Lords, pictured above. A collaboration between Directorsound and Plinth, it is less deliriously wonky than Directorsound’s amazing Two Years Today, but it is gentler, with bits of organ playing and even some singing. As it says on the back, ‘The birds play themselves’, and you can melt into it, into the outside air of Dorset, it’s as bucolic as you please. To its left, a pretty cover for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, 80p from a Debra shop.