When I was in Granada, Spain, in November last year, I noted this inscription on a plaque in the Alhambra: Dale limosna, mujer, que no hay en la vida nada como la pena de ser ciego en Granada. Roughly translated, it means: Give alms, my dear, for there’s nothing worse in life than to be blind in Granada.
I was prepared to believe it until the weekend before last, when, back in Granada for the annual conference of the Association of Independent Tour Operators, I was forced to listen to a man witter on for what seemed days about –
No, I won’t embarrass him further by saying what it was about. But his talk did make me feel keenly that there might be something worse than being blind in that lovely city. I was reduced to reading papers on the table in front of me that, until he had started, I’d been about to toss in the bin.
In The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Nick Hornby tells how, as a child forced into a church choir by his mother, he survived the vicar’s sermons by reading the hymn book. He has never since gone anywhere without taking something to read. It won’t be contemporary literary fiction, for in Hornby’s view that’s likely to be “written in prose that draws attention to itself rather than the world it describes”, and he just hasn’t the patience for it. This might limit him as a critic, but it makes him a highly reliable recommender – which is the role he takes on in The Complete Polysyllabic Spree. It’s a collection of pieces he wrote for an American magazine, The Believer, about books he had bought and wanted to read rather than books he had been sent to review. Hornby’s ideal is a book that’s going to make him walk into a lamppost while he’s reading it. So if you end up with a black eye, you can’t say you’ve not been warned.

Incidentally, I have seen that Alhambra inscription mentioned at the top of this posting attributed to both Lorca and (in a Wikipedia entry on Granada) to Francisco de Icaza. Can anyone tell me who really wrote it?