Reminder

If you were thinking of buying a copy of England and Nowhere at a discounted price, act now.  I'm about to move the book onto my public Blurb page, and add a small profit to the various prices.

I'm feeling uncommunicative at the moment, as I've done something unfortunate to my lower back by moving furniture around, and rendered myself immobile. (Is that the time? Almost time for another dose of Ibuprofen). There's something particularly humiliating about not being able to pull on your own socks, at least, not without undergoing some absurd and time-consuming contortions. I read recently that it took men on Scott's Antarctic expedition an hour each morning to get their boots on, and now I know how they felt.

Mind you, this, from the same essay, cheered me up:

Even in the privacy of their journals and diaries, polar explorers maintain a fine reserve. In his journal, Ernest Shackleton described his feeling upon seeing, for the first time in human history, the Antarctic continent beyond the mountains ringing the Ross Ice Shelf: "We watched the new mountains rise from the great unknown that lay ahead of us," he wrote, "with feelings of keen curiosity, not unmingled with awe." One wonders, after reading a great many such firsthand accounts, if polar explorers were not somehow chosen for the empty and solemn splendor of their prose styles – or even if some eminent Victorians, examining their own prose styles, realized, perhaps dismayed, that from the look of it, they would have to go in for polar exploration.
Annie Dillard, An Expedition to the Pole