Strong Poison

It was a foreshadowing of how the day was going to unravel itself when I stumbled down the stairs yesterday morning to discover I had forgotten to buy coffee. When I finally arrived at the office and checked my e-mail a long, droning missive from my son's ex-girlfriend berating him as a scrofulous cad and calling into question my parenting skills awaited me. (Why do young people string together words of continuous capital letters? The visual shouting is unbearable so early in the morning.) A glance at the clock - only 9 a.m. Not a good sign. As it turned out the e-mail might have been the highlight of the morning. The day slowly disintegrated like a soap bubble as I failed to accomplish one thing after another, and I finally left work early. My sad, abandoned desk was by that time piled to the ceiling with fruitless efforts. I am within just a few pages of finishing Sea of Poppies by Amatov Ghosh; Excellent Women by Barbara Pym is next on my TBR list. But my enthusiasm for reading has been off-kilter and haphazard over the last few days. The result of an overloaded brain, tired and on the verge of rebellion, perhaps. Maybe it has simply been pre-occupied with other more pressing matters. I suppose we all have days when we should have simply stayed in bed. Rather than go straight home, I stopped at the library. And there it was! Such an apt moniker for my day. Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers - in audio book format! All I had to do was listen to it. No effort needed on my part, no fumbling with reading glasses that keep sliding sideways (which I swear is due to one ear being slightly lower than the other. I hold to this theory even though the deviation is not apparent in the mirror.) I took the long way around the island and by the time I got home, I felt much better. Apparently, a little Lord Peter Wimsey and a juicy murder was all I needed to be right as rain again.