North-easterlies

To the dentist for another root canal. This time on an inflamed nerve. Pretty gruesome in its immediacy.

The north-easterly 'over the mountain' (tramontana) wind keeps blasting away with its peculiar accompanying translucent flat grey sky.

I finished the Clem Attlee biography recovering huddled in bed.

Funny how one reassesses one's youthful radicalism and sometimes finds it both wanting and understandable as what sometimes feels like an overdetermined outcome of one's intellectual context.

It is a very sobering book and an understated and corrective celebration of the amazing 20th century achievements of a very British sort of social democracy (or socialism, even).

The dark comes on so early. Even in Tuscany.