Have just returned from a muchos refreshing break in Cap Begur - how different life is without online access!

One of the better holiday reads was Anthony Burgess‘ Enderby series. (If you don’t know the books, Enderby is a hapless, balding, toothless middle-aged poet who writes his best work on the lavatory. He is hounded by women, and has chronic dyspepsia thanks in part to the psychological damage inflicted on him by his step-mother).

Anyway, one page got dog-eared for the following bit.

Enderby, thanks to his unwitting involvement in a notorious sex-film, has been invited to be a visiting professor of poetry by a US College and is managing to insult nearly everyone.

One of his callers, who had once termed him a toothless cocksucker (that toothlessness had been right, anyway, at that time anyway), was always threatening to bring a tomahawk to 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, which was where Enderby lodged. Also students would ring anonymously at deliberately awkward hours to revile him for his various faults - chauvinism, or some such thing; ignorance of literary figures important to the young; failure to see merit in their own free verse and gutter vocabulary. They would revile him also in class, of course, but not so freely as on the telephone. Everybody felt naked these days without the mediacy of a mechanical mode of communication.

It was that last sentence that I thought merited the dog-ear. And as serendipity had it, a couple of hours after the dog-ear my cliff-path walk took me past a nudist beach. Not a phone in site.