Last night once again, we used a book as an excuse to eat, drink
and be merry (with heavy emphasis on the eating part - there are definite
advantages in having Sharon among our number whose other half is a whizz in the
kitchen - delicious glass noodles were the result!) .
It has to be said that the book (Antoine de saint Expury's Wind
Sand & Stars) was not the evening's main topic of conversation. The fact
that a number of us had struggled to get much beyond page 30 and others thought
that it was "nice" but nothing more didn't do much to fuel the
discussion. What we did agree on was that the age of such adventurous aviation
is definitely behind us and that all of us hop on planes as easily as we hop on
buses, and that as such the level of exploration, isolation and discovery that
enhances the book is something that is missing from our hectic modern lives.
Although de saint Expury had his life-changing experiences when
he crashed his plane in the desert, the subject of mind-altering experiences
brought us neatly on to one of the hot topics of the evening... Sharon's
attendance at the "Burning Man" festival in the Nevada desert.
Sharon, if you can put us in touch with the owner of that Orgasmatron chair,
he'll have at least 7 definite customers! (For the non-attendees, it appears
that one of the more popular attractions at Burning Man was something that
women literally had to be peeled off. I'll leave it you your imagination).
Which then brought us on to the Jim Rose circus (on at the
Ancienne Belgique on Monday Sept 20th incidentally), a freak show to which a
policeman once brought me on our first date. The merits of dating policemen and
other individuals whose profession/ lifestyle is different from one's own,
Europeans' freakish habit of getting degrees in languages, Sioban's move to
Cranfield in the UK for her masters and Sharon's move to Bonn to bring a bit of
life to some dull German ex-civil servants were all also up for discussion.
As
you can tell, a cerebral, intellectual, philosophical debate was not really on
the cards. We live in hope...