Secret Selfie

Labyrinthitis Diary Day 12 - light at the end of the tunnel?

A tentative trip to buy herb plants; I can be driven short distances by a careful driver in a car without mishap - hurrah!

On the way back, waiting for the pharmacist to sort out a job lot of anti-dizziness pills, I found a book I've been after for ages in - in all places - WH Smith - Mr Vogel, by the less famous Lloyd Jones (not to be confused with the almost precisely contemporary Lloyd Jones of Mister Pip fame). Confusingly, Welsh Lloyd Jones (the one I'm interested in)'s second book is Mr Cassini, a slightly bonkers, very Welsh, psychogeographical quest, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Mr Vogel is out of print, so I have no idea how a copy came to be on sale in a dingy WH Smith buried in the bowels of an Edinburgh shopping centre. But I'm very happy that it did, and won't be complaining about the creased cover.

(As the owner of a number of better-known namesakes, I'm also pondering the ironies of being outfamed by someone with the same name, writing a similarly-named book to two of yours published either side of it. Moral: if you want to get ahead, riffing on old masters like Dickens might well be a better ploy than true originality ...)

Anyway, the photo is at the herb place, though it amuses me that the car could equally have been overgrown behind a Welsh border barn ...