This Week

This week I went to my last digital photography class at the Gallery of Photography. I had enrolled for a set of four evening classes. The first two classes covered the taking of images and the last two Photoshop. I am not the brightest bunny on the block when it comes to matters technical so my mind is dizzy with concepts such as ISO, aperture size, shutter speed, metering, and stops. I think I have managed a shaky grasp of the basics of shooting images in manual mode; hopefully some practice and a little reading to revise will allow everything sink in. Photoshop is a different matter, what seemed somewhat easy to do in class has proved difficult to replicate at home even with the aid of Photoshop Elements 10 for Dummies. Aargh!

This week, well yesterday evening actually, I went to see ‘Mr Dickens is Coming’ which was staged in Dublin’s Rotunda Hospital’s magnificent Pillar Room. It was a fund-raising event organized by the friends of the Rotunda to raise much-needed funds for the Sexual Trauma Unit at the hospital and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre. It was an extraordinary piece; a one-man show (incorporating readings from Dickens’s novels and a bit of family history) put together and performed by the actor Gerald Dickens the great-great-grandson of Charles Dickens. I learnt that Charles Dickens had himself read from his works in a different room at the hospital and thousands queued to see him. Gerald Dickens travels the world with his show I would recommend going to see it if it ever comes to a theatre near you; it’s a novel twist on literary history (no puns intended).

This week I started to read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. It is the story of Rose Edelstein who discovers on the eve of her ninth birthday that when she eats her mother’s lemon cake she can also taste her mother’s emotions; Rose is a food psychic. I am only on page sixty-seven but I am in the UK for the day tomorrow, so I hope that the time on the flights and general hanging-about-airport time will provide enough hours to finish the book before my book club meeting this coming Wednesday. An incentive to finish the book so I can go to the meeting is that the talented H maker of exceedingly excellent cakes is bring along some lemon cake for us all to share. Yummy. Our book for May is Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. One of the side effects of membership of a book club (for me anyway) is that the first thing I need to know, about the chosen book, is how many pages it has. Apparently Our Mutual Friend is six hundred plus. I better start reading it straight after Wednesday’s meeting.

I hope you had a good week. Talk to you soon.