Two Disreputable Gentlemen

.

MY APOLOGIES! I've been having strange troubles with Internet access while wandering about Great Britain. Here's what I managed to get written but was cut off before I could hit the "post" button yesterday:

I'm in Edinburgh now, but in an hour I'll be on the train to York. Meanwhile, I've been having fun. As witness the above photo.

No, it is not of Vladimir and Estragon in happier days. The two disreputable gentlemen are Ken MacLeod and your humble correspondent. Ken is best known for his brilliant and politically charged space operas. And he was kind enough to volunteer to show Marianne and me about Edinburgh on Saturday.

What, you ask, did we do? Mostly, we wandered about. Sometimes we came across a bookstore and went in. We started at Transreal, Mike Calder's wonderful science fiction bookstore in Cowgateshead, just above the Grassmarket, where I wrote a quick short-short story and then gave the manuscript to Mike. Later, we dropped into Word Press, a leftist bookstore of the sort that hasn't existed in Philadelphia since Robin's Books folded two weeks ago. And there may well have been other stores. My memory is all a happy dazzle.

And what did I do when confronted by so many wonderful books? Reader, I bought them!

*