Caves of ice

Summertime, and the living is… variable. Depends who you ask. People come to mind, of course: one in hospital, waiting for an MRI scan; another just come out of hospital having had two little frosted ova thawed out and implanted, so with a bit of luck she’ll have a baby at last.

One old chap, 90-ish, with several basal cell carcinomas on his pate from his young days as an army officer in the Palestine sun, is going for a painless zap with a cryoprobe: lesions gone and a free pathology section into the bargain. And over at Cern the Large Hadron Collider has sent a new pentaquark lately to the firmament.

The mind, generally, lags. It needs a book to provoke it into fresh life, into noticing old things anew. Tom Jackson’s Chilled will do very well indeed, especially on a hot day of lassitude and indolence. A day like this one, almost dead of its own heat.