Day 165: entertainment.

Reading books while drinking hot coffee or tea is truly one of my favourite pass-times. I love books and always have. And of a Saturday or Sunday morning, if I have the good fortune to have a decent window of spare time (what unadulterated luxury), reading is what I do. On reflection, I think the reason I love books so much is for the enormous worlds they bring to yours. By simply opening the cover, you can step into a completely different reality to your own and experience it like a local, someone who knows the inside stories and the secret reasons why, the history. And of course, you get to experience the exciting events that make up the story itself. It puts interesting things in your life and mind that wouldn't be there if you were simply living your actual, everyday, what I call life. For a mind like mine that gets bored very quickly with the same old blah, books, I think, are an important component of my keeping it together. By giving me little pockets of imagined other-worldly experience, they allow me to do things like hold down a steady job for any length of time for example. Or stay living in one country. Now it's interesting this, because it also got me thinking about the role alcohol used to play in my life which, it occurred to me, was similar to books but profoundly different too. I've said it before (and I'll say it again) that alcohol presents a distraction. Similar to a book, it offers a different head space; an escape from the straight dealing of day-time life. What's more, the way I used to use it, it would definitely offer the potential for some crazy adventures - meeting strange new people, visiting weird parts of town, pushing things in directions you might not usually just to see what happens next. But then of course, alcohol also kind of totals your memory banks, ruthlessly wiping out any number of boring and entertaining conversations, events, thoughts or happenings. So it acts as a blocker too. And in that way, it's the opposite to a book; where a book gives you a different reality to distract you from your own boring one, alcohol just comes in and stamps the boring (or exciting) reality out of existence: boring day? Nope. No boring day I can see anywhere here. You must have imagined it. Speaking of days, the one outside is looking rather beautiful. Might be time to get out into it for a little light entertainment. Something like, oh I don't know, maybe a stroll in the sunshine to my favourite bookshop (that's ariel on Oxford Street if you're wondering).