Solace

Call me naïve, but I was a bit surprised to see the obvious signs of panic-buying in two supermarkets in the Ampang area when we went out in the afternoon. It seemed so odd after the calm of the weekend when shopping centres looked pretty much deserted and there were no queues at all. The speed at which the broad crisis is developing and changing is wholly predictable yet I'm so used to the predictability of routines it manages to discombobulate.

As ever I find myself taking solace in my reading which seems particularly rich at this time. I find myself with no fewer than four books on the go. Now I admit that this seems to rub against my efforts in recent years to be rather more disciplined in terms of fixing a focus. But I'm in the happy position of being entirely unable to resist any of the four as things stand, so I'm sort of manoeuvring between them all, making sure I maintain genuine momentum through very frequent switching. This reminds me more than a little of how I used to deal with the four or five books I'd get from the library as a kid - a definite way of promoting a happy promiscuity of reading.

The happy four, by the by, are: The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I 1909 - 1939 (at which I find myself in 1923, in the playful Spring and All, with the good doctor at war with anything remotely traditional, including the usual tropes related to Spring (and all that stuff)); the second volume of A. David Moody's biography of EP, Ezra Pound: Poet, The Epic Years 1921 - 1939, which those fine people at the Book Depository sent me in hardback, even though I ordered a paperback, fortunately for the cheaper price -yeh!; Sartre's Nausea, which seems a lot more interesting now than when I first encountered it as a callowly clueless teen; and Sansom's Dark Fire, for which the term gripping might have been invented, such is its narrative drive.