(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 114

Consider myself examined.

Literary coincidences: 3

I've been tinkering with the idea of launching a small, low-admin South-East London literary festival, so this morning I was making notes as to whom I might be able to involve. Aspiring-writer mates, literary Facebook acquaintances, authors I've interviewed. Anyone from whom I might beg an under-remunerated favour, really, if they happened to be in the area. The last name I put down - on a might-as-well-ask basis - was Wendy Cope.

Out walking the dog just now, I was listening to The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz (psychoanalyst) when, in a chapter about love, a particular bit caught my ear:

As the poet Wendy Cope once told...

Literary coincidences: 1

The other day someone - apologies: I don't recall... - told me that the real reason for what we commonly understand as leprous disfigurement is not the leprosy, per se, but the steady accretion of the constant damage sufferers unwittingly do themselves, on account of their non-functioning nerve-endings [approx.].

I wasn't really sure that I believed him (this explanation, somehow, didn't seem to cover it); but, since the only thing I had to offer on the subject was the 'How did you know it wasn't contagious?' scene from Papillon, I held my whisht.

Today, though, Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life - borrowed from my wife because I'd run out of Audible credits and needed something to listen to while I was out walking the dog - confirms that this is true.