Scorchio

Apparently it's likely that the UK temperature record could be broken during the next week. It's already too hot for me, and I've been wilting this weekend, so I decided not to go down to the Victoria Embankment for this weekend's Riverside Festival, which is a pity as I always enjoy it.

I got to the gym at 11:20 this morning, which is five minutes before the Pilates class starts. As I was already changed, I decided to do the class rather than a weights session, but unfortunately all it did was remind me why I gave up going to that class last year. I am so very bad at balancing and half the class seems to involve standing on one leg. I don't understand how everyone else manages it! I am extremely inflexible the class also seems to stress my knees, but I'll admit that that is probably due to all the extra weight I'm carrying. As it was so hot, I was panting after the first five minutes, but I did make it to the end of the class, although the clock did seem to be running more and more slowly as time went on.

Fiction v. Reality

I am reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith and it is the best detective story I have read in a long time. But just as I was getting into this story of a female private detective in Botswana, following errant husbands and suchlike, things suddenly got more serious.

"Right there, in Botswana, in the late twentieth century, under that proud flag, in the midst of all that made Botswana a modern country, this thing had happened, this heart of darkness had thumped out like a drum. This little boy had been killed because some powerful person somewhere had commissioned the witchdoctor to make strengthening medecine for him."

The reason this struck such a chord with me and dragged me out from under the spell of the book, is that such things aren't just happening in a novel, but in real life, in the 21st century!