Monday, September 9.

It is Labor Day here in the USA. French Labor Day is the first of May and is just about the only day in the years when nobody works. Here, however, at least the trash collectors came at the usual time and I suspect that I could go shopping just about anywhere from the corner store to the mall supermarket and find the business open.

A few days ago I mentioned how much I like my audio book of To the Lighthouse read by Anne Stevenson. It is not a book I own, but one that comes from the Northern California online public library, Libby. Books of all kinds are checked out for 3 weeks. Popular books — and To the Lighthouse is popular — have waiting lists and recently, finding myself on the waiting list for it, I noticed that an audio for the book with a different reader was available and I took it. What was interesting was that the new ‘narrator’ was very different, but also excellent; in fact listening to a new narrator meant I noticed a lot of new things I hadn’t noticed before;when I searched online for the new narrator’s bio, I discovered she was Phillida Law, A Scottish actress and the mother of Emma and Sophie Thompson, and that she had died just a few weeks ago, at the end of July.