It's Always More Complicated

Lunar eclipse! As we came out of the National Theatre there were groups of people standing and looking up at the sky and at first we couldn't see what they were looking at and then we saw the half-moon cut the wrong way (across instead of lengthways) in the sky. By the time we got home the eclipse was complete. But now there is just a faint sliver of brightness reappearing.

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In other business: there was a copy of David Sweetman's bio of Mary Renault in the Oxfam bookshop today, only £2.99, and I thought the likelihood of one of you being interested in acquiring a copy was fairly high, so at that price I bought it. Would anyone like it?

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And also, I nearly squeed aloud in the local independent bookshop at the sight of Jenna Bailey's Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty years of friendship through a secret magazine, which I hadn't heard anything about. However, it is not only about one of my own pet interests - pre-internet virtual communities - it's based on a source which I was partly responsible for getting safely housed in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. A women's correspondence club, not 'secret' (that is a bit silly, but I suspect the publisher's hand in any title silliness), but consisting of regular budgets of articles by the members that only circulated among that restricted group (private yes, certainly). I've only dipped in so far, but haven't yet been annoyed or horrified by what the author has made of this marvellous and rare (though surely not unique) source.