Weather made sitting on the hill an option and I did it. I couldn't convince anyone else to do it. Sometimes I lie down on the hill. But not if I'm on my own. I fear getting kicked into a shallow grave by liberal toddlers. This time I looked at a book and watched some hot-air balloons and tried to ignore the sentence Eel-haired Roustabouts Lament Death of Pendulum, which was mincing back and forth across my mind behind the sounds of the words in the book I was looking at, because the death of Pendulum was being gang-lamented behind me by a bunch of somebodies. I didn't inspect the haircuts of the lamenters, but applied our location and the tones of their voices and their reaction to the hot-air balloons as they passed and the general subject matter of the conversation afterwards to my prejudices, mood, ego and residual bigotry to build up a picture of what was on top of their scalps that I was too arrogant to turn round and confirm.
On the walk home I sniffed around the local front yards looking for an excellent plank I could add to my bookshelves. People leave a lot of things on the pavements round here, you could find yourself a board game or some boots or the complete works of absolutely everybody. And there's a lot of wood and when it's not the wrong length or width I pick it up and then I have a new shelf to put books on and I take it home and put books on it and watch the books being on the shelf and the shelf being underneath the books, and the dirt on the shelves that I haven't cleaned and the dust on the bricks holding up the shelves, for days, it never gets less exciting than it is.
