February / March 2015 Review

Cold. More cold. And more cold yet. I think I have worn my faithful Tyrwhitt grey houndstooth coat for four months straight now.

I read Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, finished Heidegger’s Poetry, Language and Thought, Nevile Shute’s The Trustee from the Toolroom, Max Tegmark’s Our Mathematical Universe, William Byers’ How Mathematicians Think, Patricia Berman's In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle, Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only, and Mark Lawrence's The King of Thorns. I think I read the Fleming when I was about eleven, and it clearly formed many of my opinions about Life, The Universe and Everything. I made a start on John Eliot Gardiner's book on J S Bach, and that's going to be read in several instalments this year.

I watched Inherent Vice, Hinterland, Appropriate Behaviour at the Curzon Soho; went with Sis and Mother to the Sargent exhibition at the NPL; had a Moroccan in Shepherds Market with Sis in February and fish at Kensington Place in March. We liked Kensington Place. On DVD I watched my way through the BBC’s Strangers and Brothers, The Event, and S1 of The Bridge.

I changed my work-outs to include 12-15 sets of 5 pull-ups with pyramiding supports: starting at 57 kgs (I weigh 97 *cough*) and dropping down to 50, 43, 36, 30, then going back up to 57 and back down to 43. Everything else I do is subordinate to that. I’m going to adding in some lat pull-downs, and may try the thing where you jump up to the bar and then let yourself down slowly. I did that once for a few reps: it ached for days afterwards.

Finally I got the beginning and end of my interminable Riemann-Roch essay sorted out, and now only have some stuff about Riemann surfaces to finish it off.

Then at the end of March I left a couple of pairs of trousers on the morning train that I had been intending to take for dry cleaning while I was on a planned six-day Easter break, which is passing with a seating, fever-y, nose-stuffing, cough-retching, sleep-depriving cold.

God hates me.