My poor Bug lost its mudguard today. Well, actually only half the mudguard, which we rescued and is now sitting on the backseat. The other half is dangling precariously underneath the car. Luckily it happened while we were at the local shop buying a newspaper (although wouldn’t you know they had run out of The Times?!), but we had to drive home at a snail’s pace with this terrible scraping noise emanating from beneath the car. Lori had just phoned up the church in Plymouth and arranged to meet someone there tomorrow, but since we can’t drive with the mudguard hanging down on the road we can’t go, so she had to call them back and cancel… It seems everything is against us going to church. We will try to prise the mudguard off in the morning and go to the local New Frontiers church, which isn’t too far from here… If not I guess I’ll have to pray there’s a VW garage somewhere nearby…!

It was sunny today for the first time in about a week, so we went out to take pictures of the city for Lori’s family. I love it down by the quay with the cobblestones and swans and antique shops tucked into archways. The wind was biting, but it was lovely to walk around town in the golden afternoon light. After living in Mississippi, I always feel slightly overawed by the amount of people in a city centre over here on a Saturday. Bodies ebb and flow and almost swarm, making it difficult to manoeuvre yourself between shops. We let our hands and eyes graze a few of the books in Waterstones before coming back home to get back to reading.

We both finished Little Dorrit today! It was quite a momentous occasion, but there was a tinge of an anti-climax, as if the loose ends were tied up to quickly for a story that had taken over 800 pages to tell. It was a relief to start Jane Eyre this evening – it’s a novel I know well, of course, and yet never tire of reading. Besides that we are finishing McEwan’s The Innocent and ploughing through Nabokov’s Lolita, which makes me shudder, as it was certainly designed to do. We've been reading a lot of our material aloud, since we're taking the same classes this term. It takes longer, but it spurs us on to keep going, and we are able to read a lot more in a longer stretch. Lolita, however, is one to read quietly. It's a strength of the novel that the perversity of it can get to you, but while I can admire the prose, themes, style, and construction, the subject makes me want to close the covers tight and shut in the words.

Tomorrow I must get back to thinking about essays. I have thoughts but I’m so frustrated by the transatlantic essay. I won’t go in to that right now, though. It’s too late to get thinking about that now.