I'm reading Wanderlust, which SJ sent me, which has its good points but is like reading something written in the future when humans have atrophied limbs and big heads. I grew up in the meat puppet era, so a book about the most basic of human things, walking, is a little like a book about, say, breathing.

In some way it reminds me just a bit of Haunts of the Black Masseur, which I loved when I read it around 1994. That book is about swimming - I suppose I can boil it down that way although it's only the bare scraping of a description.

Wanderlust says some things that I have to scratch my head about - for instance, that "Premodern Europeans" were less literate as far as text but incomparably more so as far as representations went. That is, they could instantly recognise hundreds of figures in cathedrals and churches. That's the most utter pishtosh - for god's sake we are bombarded with images night 'n' day and recognise millions of people/things in those images that we will never, or can never, see in real life. Couldn't you identify these things are if you are shown single image: a map of the world, the Beatles, the Mona Lisa, Shrek, the White House, a unicorn, a shark, Nelson Mandela, etc., etc.?

I imagine all that free space in my brain if I lived in a town in Medieval times and just had to know the figures from the Bible. HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO