I’ve been reviewing and mulling over the now-finished lyrics for the Sinisthra album and have taken turns in being satisfied, frustrated and fed up with it. Also mystified, puzzled and bemused by it, and sometimes proud of it too. The writing has spanned the last three or so years so I’m not entirely sure if it makes any sense at all or is there any coherence to it. Then again, I can always plead for poetic licence as my excuse. I thought it was ready a few months ago but now there’s an additional several hundred words in which I tried to tie things up a bit. The vocals are mostly recorded now so there’s not much room to make any improvements to the lyrics anymore. It would have been nice to notice a little earlier that I tend to start every single chorus with the word ”so”. I plead for pomposity and the need to have open syllables and a fair amount of vowels in choruses. All in all, it’s been a rewarding experience. There are some very very beautiful and touching vocal melodies in there and I’ve learned that I don’t need to feel down or experience everything first hand to write about melancholic things. Here’s a Wordle word cloud of the lyrics. For some obscure reason.
Now that I’m back in the exciting world of working daily and earning actual money I’m naturally a bit short on free time to write about whatever catches my fancy. Therefore the extensive What We Did In London On Our Vacation Last Week- post is still waiting to happen.

THIS WEEKS’ BOOKS OF CHOICE:
I’m still slowly ploughing through the Umberto Eco novel I mentioned earlier. It’s heavy reading, made lighter by the occasional bouts of whimsical nonsense. At the moment the main character is having a lenghty debate with a monk about whether the Earth orbits the Sun or is it the other way round. The story takes place in the 17^th century so the monk firmly believes that Earth is in the centre of everything and all the other heavenly bodies move around it and presents an argument after argument of why this is so, each one more entertaining and more conclusive and airtight than the previous one. I enjoy reading this book quite a lot and will probably still take a few weeks to finish it.

THIS WEEKS’ BOTTLES OF CHOICE:
Rèmole, red wine from Italy. You can’t go very wrong with Sangiovese grape in my opinion, as I’ve probably stated earlier here too. Unfortunately that’s about all I have to say about this wine. Nice, appropriate and from Tuscany. I haven’t had any bad wines lately so these reviews are becoming increasingly pointless. I’m just mostly keeping track on what I’ve tasted and what to buy again or avoid, and this falls into the category ”buy again” (and into a sub-category >”but only if you can’t think of anything better to buy, and you probably can”).

Jacob's Creek Grenache Shiraz, red wine from Australia. Easy to drink, pleasant on the mouth and subtly spicy. Nothing to complain here, this has all the qualities one expects a wine within this price range to possess. Uncomplicated and to-the-point, like it’s probably meant to be. I liked it but it still, haphazardly and at random, falls into the category ”don’t buy again” (and into a sub-category ”because you can probably think of dozens of other wines to buy that are as good but as easily forgettable as this”).

The sub-categories are entirely fictional by the way. But they still might contain sub-sub-categories of equal fictionality and varying parallel categories. The main categories of ”buy” and ”don’t buy” don’t exist either but are more probable than the sub-categories. The bottles are real, though. I will stop writing this now and go take a cold shower.