Slight return

Tonight I got back my enormous loudspeakers, which a year and a half ago my wife made me give away, on the basis that nobody in Hong Kong has a right to have four-foot high loudspeakers in a cramped apartment block. You have to think of your neighbours' welfare, after all.

My friend had no such concerns for his neighbours' welfare, and has been using my enormous loudspeakers to barrage the people beneath him with bass every night for eighteen months, and so he kindly disassembled his living room and helped me cart the speakers over to my flat, in preparation for them to be shipped to Singapore where I'll find I'm again too shy to plug them in.

Or I'll live in the basement of a building and be able to listen to dirty hardcore junglist massiveism all night long.

While he unplugged, unscrewed and otherwise took the furniture apart (it was quite an undertaking, as he'd done some serious carpentry to accomodate my speakers and amplifier) he gave me an Xbox controller and I got to drive around a fake San Francisco for an hour and a half, before riding in a real taxi to Tin Hau, and then watching an increasingly fake looking Roger Moore prance around the real San Francisco in A View To A Kill. Was tonight the point that my life turned metatextual?

Speaking of metatextuality, I've been reading another Jasper Fforde - One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing - which is a return to form for him. I'd grown jaded with the last few of his Thursday Next novels - perhaps I'd read them in too swift succession, but they were beginning to feel a little less joyful than before - but this latest one is much happier, a springier affair that feels written with a lightness of touch once more.

That, or I was reading an understudied version of the last one...