Still Beginning

2 Ramadhan 1437

21.25

The really irritating moments in fasting month are those in which you momentarily forget you are fasting and the monkey mind considers - just for a second or so, but that's quite enough - having a nice drink, only to be brought back down to earth by the fact that are several hours to run before the thought of a drink can be entertained. For some reason today has seen me particularly prone to such moments. This is tiresome, to say the least, but I suppose I should welcome the experience as a necessary period of adjustment.

The funny thing is that now I'm quite free to eat and drink as I feel, I'm not terribly interested, even though we haven't eaten our main meal yet.

22.00

It hasn't just been a day of forgetfulness fortunately. I finished Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being having re-embarked on a full reading yesterday. A lot to admire, but not a great deal I felt I could connect with. His characters all seem too grown-up for me, somehow. I suppose it's all that eroticism, which seems sort of frenetically drab to me. The bit about the dog dying was touching though (but I'm not entirely sure that the writer wanted the reader sentimentalising at that point.)

To my surprise I found one or two schools using this as a text for English A: Language & Literature. Odd choice. Can't imagine trying to teach this. Presumably the teachers who have chosen it are big fans, but that's not usually a good reason for choosing texts for use in schools.