You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe in ecstasy at your feet. (Franz Kafka)

While I was waiting around in my room in typical style a couple of weeks ago, I read an unusual and rather endearing book called Death and The Penguin. It features a Ukrainian who writes obituaries for a living, about VIPs from the local post-communist society who haven't actually died yet. The penguin, adopted from cash-strapped Kiev Zoo, is a depressive with a congenital heart defect and attends a lot of funerals.

A sense of foreboding grows between Kurkov's prosaic and deadpan lines while the myopic anti-hero sits around dejectedly with his pet, alternately writing and drinking cherry brandy. Seemingly only passionate when waxing elegiacal about the increasingly pervasive presence of death, and the futilities of life, the fantastical plot unwinds slightly out-of-focus around his lonely, functional existence.

In the end Viktor is forced by events to address his own fate and actually take some decisive, individual action to save his penguin, and then himself, from the perils of their immediate circumstances. And of not really living.

Well I've neither the cash nor the inclination for vodka and heavy gambling that Viktor has, and the flight I've booked isn't bound for the antarctic, but it's a relief to finally abandon the uncertain limbo of my own making I've been living in these past few months.

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The man from the Ibizan Angels called me yesterday, exactly a moon later. Why do I feel like I know him from somewhere? I swear that guy is some kind of portent. Sometimes the little coincidences of life floor me, they really do. Well, tomorrow night is the harvest moon, and a lunar eclipse to boot. It's clear, so we'll head back to the meadows...