Mid-morning,

Drinking a big, big "bowl" of Café du Monde au Lait, listening to the last, splendid "Jewish" (Stern, Zuckerman, Rose) version of K. 563--balm to my careworn soul:  a rough day at bridge yesterday, following on to a grueling, far too early, morning re-applying for welfare.  What makes bridge rough is incompetence in one's partners--So many mistakes were made, that at several points I nearly walked out.  But I stuck it grimly through, and when I left, Mildred  loaned me a book--a work of modern fiction, much esteemed these days, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by [one] Mark Haddon, which is narrated in the person of an idiot-savant (evidently autistic) fifteen year old boy.  What strikes me, and sickens me, are two not unrelated aspects of existence among the English lower middle classes:  (1) its awful, barren, vulgar, soul-destroying brutality (or brutal vulgarity), (2) the casual, overweening disrespect of children by everybody who is not a child--always with a threat of violence.  It's  valuable background reading for those piquant observations of "indifferent, mannerless and undisciplined" American children by the much-exasperated Fannie Trollope in Domestic Manners of the Americans.