Long time no blog! I’m back after a stay in Sussex where I did a little editing but mainly relaxed. Mum and I went to Wakehurst Place – a park with many trees, flowers and lakes, which was lovely. I also met old friends and one of my best friends from my childhood whose children have grown a lot since I last saw them.
I’m getting itchy feet about being back in London; perhaps I will go for a break somewhere. I finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude and have begun Matilda by Roald Dahl (out of sequence in my reading list but I have mislaid my library card). I have also been dipping into Eats, Shoots and Leaves – The Zero Tolerance Guide to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. The back cover of the latter says:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.
This is the zero tolerance guide.
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