Monday, December 5

A day of darkness and snow. I clear away the latter and curse the former. The weather does not seem congenial for a morning walk and so I content myself with a morning’s snow clearing. The snow has turned heavy and wet but the weather forecast says it will get colder rather than warmer and so waiting for it to melt seems like a dangerous gamble.

Yesterday I started to read Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Us for a second time. I got it as a Christmas present from Irma’s mother and it formed the subject of several Sunday afternoon discussions. I notice it lying on a pouffe today, on top of a small pile of journals and magazines and some winter socks.

Neither of us had liked it much and I determined to read it again to find out if my view had changed. I have reached the halfway stage and I dislike it less than I remember. It struggles to turn a set of philosophical problems into an alternate world novel while having that alternate world act as an implicit philosophical problem for our world.

I will finish it before making any judgement but, while better constructed than I first thought, I suspect that the scaffolding will remain too visible to convince me completely.