Take everything else

but leave the fan.

Another 30+ day of heat. Survival strategy includes fans, tonic water with ice, outdoor living, and very short bursts of activity interspersed with long periods of do nothing.

Good hospital visit re my back this pm. Referred for physio but no need for scans or X-rays thank god. 

Really enjoying "The Master" by Colm Toibin. This is the great writer Henry James in Rome in 1899:

Thus he found himself on a warm May evening in the last year of the nineteenth century standing with a jolly group on a flowered terrace on the roof of Palazzo Accoramboni, overlooking St Peter’s Square. They watched the dying rays of the sun and admired the Roman domes and rooftops, and beyond, the Campagna with its aqueducts encircled by the Albine and Sabine hills. He did not need to speak but merely nod in assent as his fellow guests pointed out Castel Sant’Angelo and the dark masses of trees marking the Pincio and Villa Borghese. They spoke in a sort of wonder and excitement. They were mainly young and their light summer clothes played beautifully against the early roses and pansies and lavender which their hosts had trained with such New World enthusiasm to grow in abundance on their terrace. The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their moustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.

You can almost imagine yourself there with them.