In Over My Head

Up late and I haven't picked up a book yet. I've been reading Sunday Salon posts though. Would that count? Clare's got a good one, on "Virus Hunter".

I've got "Saxons, Vikings, and Celts" on the bedside table and I'm still not finished it. The fact is that I stay up too late and by the time I pick up the book I'm too tired to read, so I have a tendency to read about three pages and then re-read while moving my legs about or shaking my head to ward off sleep. It seldom works.

I picked up a new book last night - Sea Room by Adam Nicolson. (He's the fellow who wrote "God's Secretaries", another book on my TBR shelves that I haven't got to yet.) In Sea Room Nicolson writes of his love for a group of islands in the Hebrides which his father had bought as a young man. I haven't got very far yet, just a couple of chapters and a 'cheat' read toward the end of the book. He writes well and he seems the embodiment of Kipling's ideal man - "walks with kings nor loses the common touch" - I like him. I don't know whether the information came from the beginning of the book or my cheat read, but I see that he has some mixed emotions about ownership of the Shiants (pronounced Shants). He tells us he owns them, but acknowledges that no one can truly own a wonderful piece of nature. He wants others to share the wonder and simultaneously takes umbrage when a conservancy agency attempts to intrude on the area. I sympathize with Nicolson. Here is a remarkably decent man who feels himself steward of a natural treasure but in fact he does own the islands and is rightly offended by the cheekiness of some approaches.