Islands of light in the night

Although I am certainly feeling better than on Friday and even compared to yesterday, I have had no urge to do very anything much at all except a bit of reading and a couple of crossword puzzles.

My Sunday routine is to start the Guardian Prize cryptic with breakfast and keep going until I solve it or concede defeat. Today the setter was Paul, and I am much more familiar with his style than I was six or twelve months ago. However, it still ended up taking most of the morning. And as always many of the last clues unsolved ended up being of the "of course" variety when I finally got there.

I bought a couple of books of cryptics a long while ago. One giving 80 years of The Daily Telegraph puzzles; one per year. Recent ones had been not too hard, but I was back to the 60s, and they were much more difficult. So I turned to the Times book, which had done the same only for 75 years. Tried the one for the year of my birth, and the clue conventions were very different back then. A lot of guesswork and one or two reveals, but I did finish the puzzle. Don't think I'll bother with anything else from back then. 

Whether it was from being dropped last weekend, or just the progression of the aperture failure in my Pentax, I now have at least three or four black or almost black images before it works properly. Only this one was actually visible. Maybe I need to buy myself a birthday present.