A few stray (and utterly pointless) observations I've made this week

• I'm so very, very rubbish at spoken Russian.  So much so that I tend to leave my weekly lessons feeling a bit bad about how I must waste my teacher's time, and how she must laugh at me every time she closes her front door after I've gone.  This feeling was recently compounded by our doing sessions focusing on 'How to complain'.  Russian complaints really are quite terrifying; in the listening exercises we've been doing it seems a complaint is only a complaint if the absolute harshest of words are delivered in a staccato monotone reminiscent of steady machine gun fire.  I've tried explaining to my teacher that instructing me on how to say "Get me the manager - now!" is completely wasted, seeing as I'd never have the guts to say things like that in English, let alone in a foreign language and in a foreign country (besides which I'd have the added anxiety of what to say after the manager's been brought to me!)  But still she persists, in that formidable Russian spirit of hers.  It's quite admirable, really.  But then to be honest, even ordering half a kilo of butter sounds like a complaint when you're saying it in Russian.
• Some people find solace through food, or drink, art or talking; I find it in books and music.  But recently I've started listening to songs and storing them away in my head for possible future use, such as "I'd probably listen to that if I ever got divorced, or if someone close to me died suddenly", or "that's an uplifting one - I'll store it away for when I'm doing the washing-up".  I've also been, quite involuntarily, making mental lists of songs that would be featured not only at my own funeral, but at the funerals of specific people I know ("oooh, so-and-so would LOVE that one - I'll keep it in mind just in case I'm asked to provide the music as they're being lowered into the ground").  Though I haven't been mad enough to make actual suggestions.  Yet.
• Boringly and predictably, I've just bought a copy of Julian Barnes' 'The Sense of an Ending', in my annual "I must read the Booker winner!" resolution.  I usually alternate a Booker winner with a slightly less mentally taxing book in the name of general sanity, though as this one's only about 150 pages long I may not have that issue this time round.  Jeremy Kyle's autobiography may have to wait a bit longer to be read (incidentally the book I'm reading now, David Nobbs' 'It Had To Be You' is - as always with his books - just like sinking into a warm bath.  I don't know how he makes his characters so warm, likeable and real...even when they're people you really shouldn't have any time for.  But he does, and I admire him so much for it).
• I love Zumba.  I really, really do.  But when I'm at the front of the class and there's a mirror I'm reminded of just how un-Latin I look, plus I don't think its creators, based in Brazil, ever really considered how a Zumba class might look when being performed in a shabby community college in Essex on a rainy evening in October, by overly-white people wearing unflattering leggings.  Then again...that's probably exactly why I do love it so much.