Yesterday, after a dreadful bloodthirsty blackfly morning, we had such a lovely sudden wind gust at around four o'clock . . . and, as a result, have been without electricity for nineteen hours. Which, as another result, means that, instead of writing to you, I now have to scrub many, many sticky dirty dishes.

Nonetheless, I'll waste a few more precious dishwashing moments here so that I can share two good quotations from John Fowles's 1977 novel Daniel Martin:

Extract 1

So much prevarication, so much standing on dignity, on the assumption that the younger generation can never understand older ones; almost as if children were brought into the world only in order that their parents might have secrets from them--

Extract 2

To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with elitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea; and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real.