Of the many time-wasting activities in my personal canon, the one that is most interesting, if useless, at the moment, is my ongoing project of reading, in "real time", the New Yorker as it appeared throughout the years of the Second World War. Right now we are in late October 1940, in other words the middle of the Blitz. Each week Mollie Panter-Downes files a short but mesmerising report on how London is coping with life in what can only be described as a Living Hell. Reading history is one thing; reading contemporary accounts, from people who (obviously!) don't know what's going to happen, is both fascinating and inexplicably exciting (i.e. I know what happens, and yet I can still see it through the eyes of those who don't). A couple of weeks ago her report didn't appear in the magazine; and I spent the next seven days anxious for her safety (even though, as I know, she continued to write for the magazine for many more years).
And then when I've done that, there is Test Cricket to be followed. Never a dull moment.
