Focus..focus...focus

I'm not posting much at the moment because I'm focus, focus, focusing on work-related things although I did manage to travel for two hours by train and tube, walk for two miles and then give up on the idea of visiting an analogue studio yesterday afternoon, when I was practically outside their door.
I suddenly realised that it had been recommended by some musicians who live in Kingston, and for them Sudbury is just along the road. For me, it's a huge hike and I just turned around and came home. The result is a very sore throat from walking along Lower Sudbury Road. All those bloody Volkswagens churning out diesel particulates! Even the ice cream that I scoffed at Hampton Court station didn't resolve the sandpapery feeling and today I'm well and truly poorly.
I still managed to plan the lecturing for next week, and tomorrow I have a reading and riting day (no rithmetic) to try to iron out the creases in my research on female engineers and producers. After that it's a matter of going through the articles that I've collected and then finishing the editing of the interviews. I have been busting a gut to finish it because I need to start something else soon.
The shiny bit in the grey cloud of Sudbury exhaust was reading Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter on the numerous train and tube journeys home.
What a beautiful book it is! It's prose written with the pen of a poet, a magic realist story with a very human core. Reader, I confess to shedding a discreet tear or two. It's an inspiring book in many ways- not just for anyone who has lost a loved one (for any reason, not only death), but also in terms of written language that conjures up wonderful pictures in the imagination.
It made me feel free, in spite of being trapped in a tube of steel and glass with a lot of hot and tired commuters. I will now become a book-evangelist and bore people silly by talking about it all the time. It belongs with My Family and Other Animals and Lost in Music as a book that I will lend to people, yearn for, and have to buy again because they never give books back, do they?