WH Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Prey

My dad first introduced me to the Prey books. Dad's good like that. Sandford is also known as John Camp, who I continually confuse with John le Carre for no discernible reason. The books centre around Lucas Davenport - from the beginning he appears to be a problem solver. Unpleasant psychopath stalking Minneapolis? No problem, Davenport is there to solve the problem.

My feelings towards Davenport are frustatingly ambivalent. There are moments when I dislike him, intensely, as there are moments when I'm fascinated by him. Never, however, is he uninteresting. Never do I put the book down out of boredom.

Also, as series openers go, Rules of Prey is a fantastic book. The rest of the series lives up to this book.

And now, I'm going to go and see just what His Naughtiness is up to that's making such a strange sound (I suspect he's playing with the watering cans again, luckily they're all empty right now).

Monday's Kitten is Eight Months OId!

Look at my little darling! I can't believe he's 8 months old already. He's certainly getting to be enormous. I remember when he was just a tiny little thing. He's still got his very long legs and tail though. How much growing does he still have to do?

Know Your Cat: Understand How Your Cat Thinks and Behaves

A great big shiny cat book. I do like cat books and I'm particularly fond of this one because it combines gorgeous and adorable pictures with useful information. Also, I'm quite certain that Baby's parents were both feral cats. I'm also hoping that Baby had actually been abandoned by his mother. The idea of her coming back from hunting to find her babies all gone is heartbreaking. Given that they were a few days old and still covered in placenta suggests that they were abandoned.

Pretty pictures, useful information, pretty pictures...

Friday's Kitten is in the Shower

Sadly, this is the best picture I could get of him in the shower. He likes to go sneaking around behind the shower curtains, leaving adorable little footprints all over the bath. He was not pleased to be disturbed and flashed at. You can see how well his leg is healing in this picture too. You can barely tell that he's favouring it.

The point of Friday Kitten posts (beginning today) is to ensure that I upload the pictures of book covers that I keep having to take. Sadly, this involves things like cropping them and making them not-completely-dark, which involves using Picasa. Adding them to an old post from Picasa is time-consuming and irritating. If anyone knows how to make the folders of pictures on my computer automatically sync with the edited Picasa pictures, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know how (or, actually, if you could just make my computer do it that would be even better). I'm also partly annoyed because I'm hungry and the only thing to eat requires cooking and I'm not in the mood. But, cooking is hapening anyway.

This is an exciting weekend book-wise. The Wellness Warehouse is having another market on Kloof Street, including a book stand from Help the Rural Child, on Saturday. This is also the weekend of the V&A Waterfront's book fair, including charity books for sale and double points from Exclusive Books (sadly, I think that only applies to books from them, not books bought from the charity people).