After weeks of being wooed and assaulted by The Times Literary Supplement with teasers and sample columns and information about each current issue, I finally succumbed and bought a (short?) subscription. A weekly anything is a terrible responsibility: it's hard to keep abreast and once you fall behind the paper piles up in an overburdened basket if not on the floor beside your desk.

But I'd forgotten how good it is and how much I needed it. It reminds me how little I know and how much I need to know. I took a night off this week, a night off from my screenplay homework and from a Blue Jays game and spent the evening with the three latest issues of - may I remind you?_ this weekly magazine. I read them with a pen and a notepad and I happily underlined, highlighted and wrote notes and imperatives. The imperatives were simply that: "Read!" "Order!" "Keep!" "Copy!" You see, it's not just the reading time the TLS exacts, it's the follow-up.

I like to think I'm fairly well educated but I know I'm not when I read essays and reviews by the most casually erudite people, tossing off their documented opinions with lavish, snobbish assurance. I forget that each one is an expert in their field and probably as abysmal as I am in another sphere of knowledge, at least, it comforts me to think so.

Today is the beginning of summer for me: my first Stratford show of the season. Twelfth Night. I'll tell you about it, if I have time.

Anon, anon.