Getting colder

It's strange that even though it's ten or twelve degrees warmer in Hong Kong than it was in Canada, it still feels colder. I didn't take my jacket off all day long at the office, and several times I had to put gloves on to stop my hands from going numb. Truly this is the winter of my discontent.

To cheer myself up, I read the rest of Our Game, a later-period John Le Carre. It's not as good as his earlier stuff (or perhaps his later work); the first two hundred pages in England work well, but towards the end as he rushes around Russia, things feel too compressed, everything telescoped together into a crowded space you care little for. By the end he's trying to make Important Statements about small nations and the evils of large nations, but you come into the book wanting to read about spycraft and more comprehensible activities.

Not that it's terrible, and it's not like it has the most depressing end that has ever been penned, but it leaves you feeling a little ... jaded by it all. Or perhaps that's just a combination of the end of jet lag, plus too much hummus for lunch.

Anyway, that's another book finished and so the pile I have to read before I can buy anything new shrinks again; one less le Carre, one less grindingly awful Scandinavian detective novel. I could start on the Icelandic stuff, or I could start on le Carre's latest (a birthday present) but I think perhaps I'd do better to get some sleep and consider my set for tomorrow. It's going to be my first time on stage since before Christmas so I feel a bit rusty, so perhaps it wasn't so bright to sign up for a day of being an extra on a film tomorrow. We shall see.

How the world turns, eh? This time last year I was auditioning for a part in a fairly awful sounding film. Now I'm going to be standing in the background of a film, although this time I don't know if it's been written with an equally tin ear, because nobody's shown me the script. If it does turn out to be full of anachronistically bad references to onanism, I will of course report that here.

Till then, I'm snuggling up with my electric heater and decrying the cold.