Right handed. My wallet is in my left pocket, since anything that I need to do with it will involve holding it with my left and doing the thing with my right.

Both my phones (home and work) are in my right, since I can carry out basic functions on them one handed.

It sounds like this is the page that you want.

Not since the early '80s.

It’s the end of a fortnight’s holiday for me, so I’m driving home tomorrow, followed by pizza and undemanding tv comedy when I get home to my wife. I have missed her a lot.

On Sunday there are some post-holiday logistics and chores to sort out, but we’ll have lunch out and probably play Gloom in the evening: a card game that one of the friends with whom I am on holiday introduced me to. I ordered a set myself after the first game.

Yes. Why do you ask?

Ha, yes. They have now updated the photos. I imagine that there were quite a few people pointing this out to them.

The photos that the Independent are using at North American elk - Cervus canadensis. However, the species that they are actually looking to introduce are Aces alces - Eurasian elk, which are what North Americans know as moose.

The Guardian did get this right a few days back.

ETA: they have now corrected the photos.

I think that it does improve after ep1, but we still abandoned it after around 4 eps. There was still nothing compelling or that added to the overall Duniverse.

Not specifically for the eyes or posture, but for overall approach and attitude to situations like this:

• Marcus Aurelius’ quote: Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. - and stoicism in general.
• Imagine them sitting on the toilet. You can’t take them too seriously like that.
• Take a longer perspective: consider whether this interaction will be of any significance at all in 10 years time?

Just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shroud, after a bit of delay in the middle. Some good world-building and interesting concepts, and an engaging tale - but not quite up with Children of Time, I’d say.

About a third of the way through Iain M Banks’ Use of Weapons. It seems too focused on the flashbacks - which have not coalesced into a cohesive whole so far. There is still plenty of time, of course.

Comments like that say far more about the person saying it than about the person being described most of the time, I’d say.

I’d need to know how good the describer is like in that area before I could make any assessment about the describee.

Yes. This is one of his Culture novels. I’ve been enjoying them so far.

The run up to a fortnight of holiday for me, so the days were simultaneously dragging and full of stuff that I was trying to get finished or progressed as much as possible.

However, now I am dozing in the sun with the requisite amounts of clotted cream and cider and a stack of books (Banks’ Use of Weapons at the moment).

Once the BH crowds have thinned, I will probably get out for some coastal hikes too.

Very little is grabbing me right now. Probably only The Phoenician Scheme really.

I had a nap yesterday afternoon, which is probably the first for several months. However, I am on holiday for a couple of weeks now, so will probably be having more over that time.

Pizza, cheesecake, wife’s puppy eyes,

Shadow (2018) - beautifully designed and shot, particularly in the first half. Relatively gory for a wuxia: I didn’t mind but my wife, who is quite sensitive to such things, found it too much at times.

As with Zhang Yimou’s earlier House of Flying Daggers I felt that that it didn’t really reach a conclusion as much as ended the story and then drifted to a stop.

Definitely worth seeing though.

No. I’m not interested in interaction when I am buying or selling something. Nor playing games, or getting or giving social strokes or whatever. I will do that on separate occasions.

I will pay the price asked or I will look elsewhere.

I don’t drink either - or any other hot drinks. I have never liked them.

There was a while when, every other year or so, in the depths of winter, I would get it into my head that my tastes might have changed and would accept someone’s offer of something: tea, coffee, hot chocolate or whatever. But I’d always end up taking one sip and realise my folly.

And, no, Iced tea or similar does nothing for me either.

A good deal of the current Scottish population are descended from the Irish, which goes some way to explaining that side of your comparison, but I am not aware of Finland being particularly cloudy.

I have not consulted any climatic records, but I would have expected it to be less cloudy than the rest of Scandinavia, really, since the rain will have been deposited on the mountain in Norway and Sweden before the air masses reach Finland.