Just today a friend forwarded me a brief excerpt from David Herbert's gossipy memoir that threw me into little paroxyisms of nostalgia:

"The English community has dwindled, not so much in numbers as in personalities. In the old days Tangier attracted individual people - people with character, eccentric, tragic people, wicked people, but seldom ordinary people. Now for the most part they are ordinary. I suppose it is the same the world over. There is no time for eccentricity because leisure has ceased to exist. Everyone is too busy merely trying to make ends meet."

Of course, this is what I have done in my own way all my adult life. Thus 37 years ago finding Santa Cruz the perfect place for my kind of eccentrics and eccentricities. Then, when I moved to "Slownoma" three years ago, . I've never been a formal salon kind of guy except in informal and spontaneous ways....