Lies.

I am actually reading David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten in Freetown, but let’s pretend I’m not, let’s pretend it’s two days ago when I was reading Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor in Brussels.

A photo posted by @clotidian on Jan 23, 2016 at 10:13am PST

The best way to get from the UK to Freetown at the moment is on Brussels Airways, which is actually a perfectly pleasant airline with decent food and legroom and seemingly endless episodes of The Big Bang Theory, without which no plane journey is complete – BUT if flying from London it involves a heartbreakingly bleak 6.50am flight from Heathrow, which requires a 4am taxi, and I just. Cannot. Instead I had the genius idea of taking the Eurostar over to Brussels on a Friday evening, spending a couple of nights with my friend J. (whom I met in a Mozambican backpackers’ hostel nearly nineteen years ago, on my first ever trip to Africa) and his girlfriend C., eating nice food and looking at art nouveau architecture, and having a very respectable 12.15pm flight from Brussels Airport on the Sunday. It was delightful. As was The Goblin Emperor. I confess I was initially put off by the title, which sounded a bit too High Fantasy for my tastes, and the extensive cast of characters with similar(ish) names doesn’t really lend itself to being read on a Kindle, as it’s not easy to keep flicking back and forth between the action and the character list. But in the end it’s a lovely long immersive book about someone piecing himself back together, and other people being kind to him while he does so. Made me feel better about the world. V. g.

A photo posted by @clotidian on Jan 23, 2016 at 10:13am PST