Friday (the 27th) I had two chunks of flesh cut out of me for biopsies. One was a a wart which is viral as everyone knows, but if it persists must be checked for malignancy. The other was something on my back that had started to bleed. Just dry skin, I'm sure, because I swim every day. I think I've already said I feel like a bear with need of a tree trunk to rub my back against. But it also must be checked. Does anyone check a bear?

So I mustn't swim for a while to allow the wounds to heal without getting infected. Next week I won't feel like this but right now it's holiday time. Not that I slept in, but that I could read the NYT and The Manchester Guardian without watching the clock.

Lots of thoughts - TBA

I still couldn't find my copy of Dinnerstein's Mermaid and Minotaur because it's on a high shelf of a bookcase and my library steps are covered with papers I'm working on and I'm afraid of heights. But I googled it and I was right in my opinion that if everyone had read and followed her advice in child-rearing, then we wouldn't have MeToo and Time's Up and all these recriminations today and we'd still have Charlie Rose and Garrison Keillor and even Woody Allen. (O, how the landscape has changed!) Dinnerstein's idea was that men should share fully in the nurture and raising of children so that we would then, obviously, end up with boys with a different attitude to women. Of course, Rose and Keillor and Allen wouldn't be like that. The world would be a different place.

If-onlies go too far.