Home made emoticon  = You have me there. I just don't know!

A photograph in the Independent shows a seemingly endless line of people winding up the track leading to the top of Snowdon in North Wales. It is the easy route I seem to remember but easy or hard it strikes me as  horribly overcrowded. When I last walked up that way there was no one in front and no one behind us, though we met  one or two coming down. People I believe now  queue to climb Mount Everest which less than 100 years  ago no one had reached the and survived. High time to explore space to escape our fellow humans.

As I draw to the end of L'Abesse de Castro,  a long short story by Stendhal,  feeling compelled to read more Stendhal, I reach for my copy of Le Rouge et Le Noir, but the prints is small and densely spread across the page. Can Amazon help me with a  Kindle French edition. For some reason you can't obtain Kindle editions from Amazon, France in the UK. And Yes. Within a couple of minutes it is installed. And at zero cost. Kindle has its drawbacks. But this is  reassuring. And with a French dictionary on board I feel wonderfully relaxed about the project.