'like a thief in the night'

I was intending to be walking in North Yorkshire this week, with wanderings through beautiful Swaledale, and hiking up onto the North York Moors. I should have left on Saturday. Instead, I spent three days in hospital, and now know that my feeling of being below par was more than a feeling. After much needle stickings, scans, X-rays etc, it was established that I have a pulmonary embolism - blood clots in the lungs to you and me. When the doctor told George Orwell that he was lucky that the round which passed through his neck missed anything vital, Orwell replied that he would have considered himself lucky if the shot had missed altogether. I get Orwell's point, but I am lucky, as walking up into the North York Moors would have, in all probability, seen me off. 'I will come like a thief in the night'.

On the up side, being in hospital meant that I was able to finally finish Paul Elliott's The Last Legionary, which is a very neatly put together book - full marks. I also had time to read this little known Nevil Shute:

Although it was first published in 1928, it took Shute two years to write (his day job at the time was working on the R101), and it is a fine piece of 1926 General Strike literature - full of international Bolshevism, fellow-travelling Members of Parliament, disgruntled trades union officials, stalwart English craftsmen, country houses, veterans of the Great War, rural versus industrial life, flying (of course - a Breguet XIX is at the centre of the action), and, very interestingly, the view that Italian fascists were fine fellows - 'I liked the look of them', says the hero of a squad of Northern Italian Blackshirts. A fascinating period piece, and the 1959 cover of the edition I have is another period piece. I've always found all this sort of stuff interesting - looking up from where I am sitting, I realised that most of the books (with the exception of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson), and the models are all early twentieth century: