Wednesday was the day of the annual outing for the library staff: we went to Enköping to look at the parks. The weather was brilliant so it was a very enjoyable experience; it would have been even more so if my back hadn’t started hurting badly rather early on, but there was plenty of opportunity for sitting down in the various parks so that was ok. After lunch we were taken out to a trial site for the seed developers Svalöf Weibull — well, we are an agricultural university library so this was in line with our work. Here we would have wished for slightly less brilliant weather, though; the sun was merciless as we stood in the field — at least one person suffered a mild sun-stroke. Such are the dangers of a librarian’s life.

In the bus transporting us to and from Enköping I started reading Perdido Street Station, but then I put it back on the “To Read”-shelf. It’s hard to define why I don’t feel like reading it now; I’ve not given up on it, far from it, but I wasn’t hooked even a little bit and Johan tells me it took him several hundred pages to get really involved in it. I don’t want to bring a book with me to France that I am not sure I’ll really want to read, I guess. Instead I’m taking Thief of Time (which I started on yesterday, after reading Tove Jansson’s Rent spel on the bus to work — it was a short book, lasting only one bus trip. Not my favourite Jansson to date but I liked it.) , The Years of Rice and Salt and A Song for Arbonne — the latter being one of the very few books we own that’s set in Provence. . .

I’m leaving tonight, on AF1063 to CDG. Packing might be a good idea actually, and perhaps I’ll switch on the TV also and have Sweden-Nigeria in the background.