What was the song? Mary couldn’t quite remember. It was one of Mr Pepper’s classics, certainly. A ballad. Possibly You Are My Sunshine? What did it matter; the point was the voice. Not Mr Pepper’s – she knew what he sounded like well enough, being one of Easterlea Rest Home’s regular afternoon entertainers. No, this voice was new, and belonged to a man who had sat down in the chair next to her and started to sing along. She was so stunned – by the way his voice seemed to pour out of him, by its fierce clarity and defiance of age – that she turned to stare.
The man winked at her. Cheeky bugger, thought Mary.
When I got an unexpected job ghostwriting romance novels earlier this year, I thought I’d found an easy way to earn some money and get some fun stories to tell at dinner parties. I hadn’t read a lot of romances, but the opportunity to write all day was too good to pass up.
I quickly realized that I enjoyed the challenge of churning out thousands of words a day. But the deeper into my job I got, the more obvious it became that my day job was sharply out of step with my real life.
All Tetris ultimately shows is that no matter how much you think you are in control, there are limits. And it’s only a matter of time before chaos rules again. All I want is a world where problems arrive slowly with time to slot them into tidy solutions.
But a big part of my appreciation for leftovers is simply due to the fact that, despite their sometimes stayed reputation, when one assesses the spectrum of food history, leftovers are a relatively new invention. And who doesn’t like a little novelty?
The Tokyo cafe's staff are elderly people dealing with dementia, which makes for a, shall we say, unique experience for diners. As the restaurant's website puts it, "all of our servers are people living with dementia. They may, or may not, get your order right." And indeed they don't, nearly 40% of the time.
But the restaurant says that diners can "rest assured that even if your order is mistaken, everything on our menu is delicious and one of a kind." And that's surely part of why their customer satisfaction rating is at a solid 99%.
De Hamel could easily have written this book as another entry in the genre. Instead, he wrote a love story. The madhouse is a place of isolation, and his interest is with community: with the passion for art, for learning, for nerdy minutiae, for history still living and breathing on the page, that brings manuscript lovers together. If you can imagine shedding tears because a manuscript is so exquisite, then this is a book about your people.