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I keep wanting to buy some ludicrously expensive, new and improved household gadget, but I am at last beginning to be slightly sales-resistant though I still fall for books forgetting that you can't wear them or eat them and they take a long time to read.
Many people mistake the practice of psychoanalysis for an adequate substitute for real life. I don't know what ‘real life’ is, but I am jolly sure that psychoanalysis is no good unless it resembles it. ‘A prelude to – not a substitute for –’ I try to tell them. ‘A substitute is a substitute is a substitute’, as Gertrude Stein might have said.
I am glad your visit to France was rewarding even as a rest for your mind and a chance for an airing of your bodily capacities. I hope your muscles have recovered and that you are not now experiencing too violent a battering of your mental capacity. The great thing about having such experiences is that in the course of balancing one thing against another you also get a clue to who you are. And more still, you become YOU. ‘I have six honest serving men’ says Kipling in Just So Stories. A great and good man despite his unfortunate obsession with Stalky and Co. – the British Army which is so much more stupid than he allowed himself to realize. But all institutions are stupid and try to crush the individuals inside them. If not by blame, then praise. ‘Treat both those impostors alike’ – as Kipling again says.
At present I am suffering a momentary dose of ‘success’ which I try to do without being caught by surprise when the next bash comes; or having my pleasant interlude eroded by preoccupations with the next unknown horrors!
Mummy is overworking but don't tell her I said so. These Mothers get awfully shirty if fussed over.