Legends of the Sun Pig

When Alex was very young, he used to be a bit of a thrill-seeker, always heading straight for the tallest slide in the playground. As he has got older, a cautious streak has emerged. He’s not mad keen on rollercoasters like Fiona is, for example.

But Alex has always enjoyed climbing, and been very good at it. In the summer of 2010 his holiday club took a trip to our local indoor climbing centre ([Klimhal Amsterdam](http://www.klimhalamsterdam.nl/)). He and Fiona both had a great time, and the group leader told me that Alex went straight up the walls like Spider Man. It was Fiona, though, who wanted to to back in the autumn and try out some lessons. Which then led to _me_ taking it up.

A couple of weeks ago I asked Alex if he wanted to come along and try it some time, and I was surprised when he said yes. He usually prefers to stay home and play games, but recently he seems to be restless for physical activity. So yesterday morning we went to the Klimhal and had a _fantastic_ time.

I had been worried that Alex would get a couple of meters up the first wall, look down, and decide that he didn’t want to do this any more. Absolutely not the case. The half-height walls on the first floor were quiet, so we started there. After drilling him on the basic safety procedures, he scampered right up a grade 3 route with no difficulty whatsoever. Then he conquered a few 4s, and by the end of our time he was tackling 5a routes and loving it. Whenever he got tired and needed a rest, I would do a couple of boulders. We were at it for well over two hours. “This is awesome!” he said. “Can we come back again next week?”

It was so much fun to see Alex enjoy himself so much in a physical activity, and to see him so confident in his own natural ability. If he picks this up as a hobby, he’ll be out-climbing me in no time.

It was also great to have an activity that he and I can do together. I loved the time Fiona and I spent playing golf just the two of us in the summer. Sharing moments like that with the kids is precious. If Fiona (and Abi) want to join us next weekend, I’d love that too. But the couple of hours I had with Alex yesterday will stick in my memory as extra special.

Brand: Donny Craves
Product: Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie
Purchased: Albert Heijn To Go, Amsterdam Central Station

This may be a “Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie”, but it’s not a chewy chocolate chip cookie. The cookie was dense, dry, and crumbly, with a fibrous oatmealy texture. The brown chips might have been chocolate, but I couldn’t tell by their taste. The overall flavour sensation was coconut and cinnamon.

Disgusting. Avoid.

Marvellous support by Little Fire (Jamie McGeechan), who has a voice like a warm woollen scarf on a cold winter’s day. Check out his video of “You Mean Something To Me” on YouTube. (No, not the Paul Weller song. That’s “You Do Something To Me.”)

Then it was time for funk:

1. Duty to the Debtor
2. Fireball
3. Goodbye to Me
4. Darkness Falls
5. Fail You Better
6. History City
7. Hand and Heart
8. Looking for Linda
9. Remote
10. Summer Head Daze
11. She Makes a Sound
12. Irreversible Situation
13. Labour of Love
14. Little Man
15. Headin’ for a Fall
16. Strength to Strength

Encore:

17. Mother Glasgow (Embra version!)
18. Carlos Takes the Fall

Lovely set, and I had a great time. I’d love to see them in a venue without seats, though. With this kind of music I want to be bouncing up and down in a crowd in front of the stage.

1. The Modern Leper
2. Nothing Like You
3. Old Old Fashioned
4. The Twist
5. State Hospital
6. Fast Blood
7. Music Now
8. Head Rolls Off
9. Swim Until You Can’t See Land
10. Boxing Night
11. My Backwards Walk
12. Square 9

Encore:

13. Poke
14. Scottish Winds
15. Good Arms vs Bad Arms
16. Living in Colour
17. The Loneliness and the Scream

Abi and I have always been book lovers, both for the stories within them and as physical items. We have a nice collection of books, probably somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 at the moment. We even designed our living room around the books, giving ourselves what we call the “Library Corner” as shown in the picture. There was a time in the late nineties when our Saturday activity consisted of taking a bus to some part of Edinburgh, and scouring all of the charity shops for 25p second-hand science fiction paperbacks. We had about 2500 books (mostly in boxes) by the mid-noughties, but we thinned the collection substantially before we moved to the Netherlands in 2007.

I was sad, though, when I added Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers Of London to the shelves. I had bought it for taking with us on holiday to France this year, and it is a fantastic book. So good, in fact, that as soon as I finished it, I downloaded Moon Over Soho, the second book in the series, onto my brand new Kindle. And when I finished the second, I downloaded Whispers Under Ground immediately, too.

Which meant that when we got back home, I could only add the first book in the series to the shelves. It looks lonely there, without its sequels. And the sequels look out of place in my ebook collection without the first book. It’s an awkward half-way situation that emphasizes my ambiguity about ebooks: now that I have a good ebook reader — a Kindle, as opposed to an iPad — I do actually like reading ebooks on it. But I also want to own the books-as-physical-objects for my library. What do I do: buy both?

Abi and I both have (or at least had) a dream of growing old surrounded by books, in a house with a library, not just a library corner. What will ebooks do to this dream? From a practical standpoint, I can easily see myself preferring to read ebooks rather than physical books very soon. Publishers and authors are reporting large percentages of their sales coming from ebooks now, and some (self-published) novels I’ve read recently are only available electronically. Just like MP3s replaced CDs, I think it’s inevitable that the convenience of ebooks will trump their shortcomings, and they will become the default reading format. A bookcase full of physical books will be an interior design feature for evoking a late 20th Century vibe, rather than a household standard. Having a library will mark you as an eccentric.

I like to think that I will continue to buy physical books, and that our library will keep growing. But it was a very long time before I inserted Ben Aaronovitch at the very start of the alphabet, ahead of Douglas Adams. How long will it be before I place another book in that spot, if ever?