June

"Love! You don't have to be sorry! It's those scumbag reporters who should be sorry. Making up all those stories. Putting words in people's mouths. Poor Suzie phoned us up, very upset. You know, she gave that girl three bourbon biscuits and a KitKat, and this is the thanks she gets. A load of outlandish lies! I mean, pretending to be from the council tax. They should be prosecuted!"

"Mum..." I closed my eyes, almost unable to say it. "It's not all lies. They... they didn't make everything up." There's a short silence, and I can hear Mum breathing anxiously down the line. "I am kind of in a... a bit of a debt."

"Well," says Mum after a pause –- and I can hear her gearing herself up to be positive. "Well. So what? Even if you are, is it any of their business?" She pauses, and I hear a voice in the background. "Exactly! Dad says, 'if the American economy can be in debt by billions and still survive, then so can you.'"

God, I love my parents. If I told them I'd committed murder they'd soon find some reason why the victim had it coming to him.

-- Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella

***

New month, new (profile) picture.

Typically the month for rest, among students everywhere, this is the month at the end of which my thesis is due. (It looks to be extended, but things are a little messy at the moment, and it doesn't mean that I will have more time, it just means that I will have more work. But that's not the point.) You can imagine that all is not too pretty over here.

Nevertheless, I am in need of some compulsive stocktaking, so you're going to get a bunch of info that is neither interesting or informative. I'm not likely to repeat any regular book-reading habit in the next couple of months (not outside of scientific journals, at least), so you might never see such a thing in this blog again, but this is a list of what I've read in the month of May:

• The Family Way by Tony Parsons
• The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• Shopaholic Takes Manhattan by Sophie Kinsella
• Shopaholic Ties the Knot by Sophie Kinsella
• Shopaholic and Sister by Sophie Kinsella
• Why Won't They Listen? by Ken Ham

A lot of frivolous reading, I know. But now that I've completed the Shopaholic series, and assuming Ms Kinsella doesn't churn out any more, we should be quite done with that. I haven't quite found the desire to expound on any of the books, other than that one "review" that I wrote. So, happy holidays and all that. And for those of you who are working... er, well, just keep plugging away, I guess. :)