Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

Do not neglect to bring your revolver, Russell. It may be needed, and it does us no good in your drawer with that disgusting cheese." "My lovely Stilton; it's almost ripe, too. I do hope Mr. Thomas enjoys it." "Any riper and it will eat through the woodwork and drop into the room below." "You envy me my educated tastes." "That I will not honour with a response. Get out the door, Russell.

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound - now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight.

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.