Raining! - or it was...all night, in morning cloud hid everything; drizzle in courtyard. Last night's fury falling on plug to which outside acquarium connected shorted everything and plunged house into darkness. Granny and Beloved fumble around with matches and candles, cursing them and each other. Situation sorted.

Wind now back to north; presumably all will go on just as ever. Sun coming out. Air still cooler though.

Beloved off to bank. Granny alone and enjoying herself. Feeling somewhat recovered from yesterday's indignities, apart from having to immerse her lower regions in an iodine solution every now and then. (Agua tibia - no frio no caliente: lukewarm water, etc, doctor insisted.) Beloved, not very helpfully points out that ageing future probably involves much more of such things. Chalfonts of course, granny reminds him, can arrive at any age. (She likes; 'chalfonts': So much nicer than saying piles!) But he's right just the same. Groan. Oh for a plastic body which goes on for ever. Provided plastic mind does not go with it.

Interesting piece in newly arrived (late) TLS by Galen Strawson, deploring over emphasis, moral and psychological, on virtue of narrative approach to life and lives. Somewhat special pleading, because that doesn't fit his own approach, but interesting all the same. He divides people into diachronic types - who naturally see their lives as narrative - and episodic, like himself, who don't. Actually this perfectly fits differences between Granny and Beloved - Beloved claiming he doesn't remember except in bits and only when he needs to; whereas Granny is continually making a story of her life. (More than a hint no doubt, of granny being as solipsistic as Strawson in defending this.) The distinction she makes here between himself and her, Beloved insists, is wholly intuitive; it's not entirely valid - being, by definition, untestable. She thinks he means this anyway, so accuses him of being over-reliant on the empirical. He denies it. All this is familiar stuff and leads to usual impasse: she can't follow his thinking into its farther reaches just as he cannot follow hers. Not an uninteresting argument for the ageing just the same, she thinks. Memory stretches ever further - and what is remembered - to her - becomes the more interesting the stranger - because more remote - it is. As strange to her almost as to her grandchildren who call it history. Does she (as narrative not snapshot person) call it history? She even thinks she might. Recalling accurately needs a historian's care, not least. For snapshot recallers, perhaps, too, if they rate the activity of remembering. Beloved, at least, doesn't. Others, maybe, do.

Sun now full. Colours deep; brilliant. The pleasure of the rainy morning all gone. No doubt though she will encounter many more colder such - and with less pleasure - in the UK next week.

Time to do tax; this blog is pure diversion tactic. Get on with it, Granny. Grannypxx