Lesson Nine: Getting Back on the Horse
After breaking up with one book, how quickly do you get with another?
Six weeks after our wedding party, my ex-husband was in bed with another woman he’d met a few days previously. I remember the remark of my divorce lawyer when I told her: ‘Wow, he didn’t even stop to lick his wounds.’
I think I’ve spent longer getting over a particularly emotional book I’ve read. But anyway, each to their own.
On Friday of half term, I spent the day in London with my daughter and some old friends. We visited the British Museum, a place I have wanted to go all year. I wandered through Ancient Egypt, marvelling at the hieroglyphics, moved by the desire humans have always had to communicate with one another. And then we came to the room I had been most excited about — room 21.
This room contains the remains of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — the mausoleum of King Mavsolos. The original wonder lay thousands of miles away in Bodrum, Turkey, (known as Halicarnassus back in the fourth century BC) a place where I lived in my twenties. The mausoleum is thought …