My inability to entertain myself is probably getting close to abnormal. I was recently in Rome and ran out of reading matter just before we were about to travel back to London. Panic! What will I do? Think my own thoughts? What a horrible prospect. So I looked through the Kindle app on my travelling companion’s iPad and found a bunch of books by an author who I loved as a teenager – Terry Pratchett, which included my old favourite MORT.
MORT is the story of an awkward young man who cannot find an apprenticeship in his own village and so agrees to become an apprentice to an athropomorphic entity representing DEATH. So he learns the scythe carrying, and the hour glass wrangling, and so forth and so on . . . never mind: the fun of Terry Pratchett is not in the plot, which is always a bit half-hearted. It’s not the destination, or even the journey, it’s more the scenery. As for example when Mort is looking at a rock: “It had curly shells in it, relics of the early days of the world when the Creator had made creatures out of stone, no one knew why.”
It got me to London, anyway.