Some have described me as whimsical

Note: this was written last night before I went to bed.

I'm finally reading Neil Gaiman, American Gods. It's entertaining and interesting. I can appreciate literary artifice, but what has always appealed to me most is the story itself. Likewise, I'm reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have been delaying finishing it. I think I don't want to let it do. I have done that many times in the last few years. I don't want to let go of something I am enjoying; I fear I'll lose it for good.

I still need to finish Stephen King, On Writing. It's strange that many of the things King advises are at odds with what I learned in school. For King "he said" is perfect, but in school it was banned, bland. For King adverbs are poison. In school they were near mandatory. I'm sure there are many reasons (I can think of one) for the discrepancy, but it's the difference itself which catches my eye.

I hope this fitness programme works. I still don't know what I'll do afterwards, but maybe I should just keep putting one foot in front of the other for now. If I look at the horizon I might trip and land in the mud. I had a good walk today. I went up along the canal, then took a ramble though some boggy fields. The public footpaths hereabouts are puzzling. They start and stop without reason, and they curl all over themselves like Spaghetti Junction. There's mud all over, on the canal path as well as the fields. There was ice still in the water.

A pair of ducks swam warily away from me as I walked back, the female pushing a lump of ice before her. "Silly ducks," I said. I do like ducks. There's a pond near my home, and the people who live nearby have been overfeeding the ducks. So now we get as many as twenty-seven ducks of several species coming to our front door, mendicants for food. Well, time to sleep, I think.