I have been exercising at a different Y this week, the one in Greenfield is where I ended up a few nights. What a joy to discover that they have a Wi-Fi signal there. So I popped out my itouch and listened to my Pandora program while on the Elyptical.

My current gym book remains Andrew Eame’s story about his journey following Agatha Christy, titled The 8:55 to Baghdad. He describes a bunch of new passengers who would be joining him from Syria into Iraq. I loved the way he writes about people.

“She was a tall, slightly bent lady with a very gentle voice that tended to witter on and then tail away when she realized nobody in particular was listening, a mannerism that concealed the fact that she was actually a very shrewd academic from Oxford. She had floppy grey-blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses, behind which lurked a pair of pale, quiet eyes. Brigitte was the oldest of all of us at eighty-one, but she wore jeans, monkey boots, had a penchant for vodka and cigarettes and was invariably vigorous and cheerful. Years of smoking had given her a voice like Marlene Dietrich, but hadn’t impeded her health a jot and she could skip across ravaged temple sites, all sand and rubble, like a gazelle.

Then there was Charles, a dry-as-a-bone antiques dealer in his late twenties but with attitudes that were already gathering dust. His pallid, Tweedledee physique and cavalry twill wardrobe made him seem much older.”

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