Rose George has previously shared with readers her voyages across the world following cargo ships and movements to make sanitation both more eco-friendly and readily available to poorer communities. In Nine Pints, she dips into the circulatory system. The result is my least favorite of her offerings, though it’s diverting enough, with a mix of history, science, and explorations of the British blood bank system. She delves into its origins, and into bloodletting’ history– from ancient ideas about the four humors, to the contemporary use of leeches to clean wounds. There’s a good section on bloodborne diseases like HIV/AIDs, and several sections involving menstruation — taboos about it, one man’s attempt to create cheap sanitary napkins, etc. As a childless bachelor, my interest in that subject is rather handicapped, as you might expect. What most disappointed me in this book was the complete absence of renal disease and the need for blood dialysis, which would be more substantive than a section on kooks who drink blood and call themselves vampires. She also falls into the modern error of using ‘gender’ when ‘sex’ is more appropriate, referring to the lower rate of hemoglobin replenishment in women than in men as a ‘gendered’ difference. That women wear panties and not boxer shorts is a gendered difference: that women have periods is a sexual difference.

In a completely different realm, I discovered the existence of Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit upon one of my friend’s bookshelves, and naturally had to tackle it. I’ve read loads of Wodehouse before, and as usual relished Wodehouse’s way with the English language. As is the usual with a Bertie story, there are several intersecting little threads that get increasingly tangled to hilarious results: the most prominent thread is that a woman who is occasionally engaged to Bertie (he’s a popular fellow to be engaged to) is having issues with her current fiance, and Bertie gloomily suspects that she’ll come after him again if something isn’t done. The current fiance also regards Bertie as a threat to his nupitals, and keeps threatening to break Bertie’s spine in several places — especially after he catches Bertie in his fiance’s room in the middle of the night, not knowing Bertie was merely there to burgle the room on behalf of his aunt, who wanted him to steal the fake pearl necklace in her cabinet so her husband would not discover she’d pawned the real one. But that’s another thread. Anyoo, here’s some quotes:

Love is a delicate plant that needs constant tending and nurturing, and this cannot be done by snorting at the adored object like a gas explosion and calling her friends lice. I had the disquieting impression that it wouldn’t take too much to make the Stilton-Florence axis go p’fft again, and who could say that in this event, the latter, back in circulation, would not decide to hitch on to me once more?

I was appalled, and I think not unjustifiably so. I mean, dash it, a fellow who has always prided himself on the scrupulous delicacy of his relations with the other sex doesn’t like to have it supposed that he deliberately shins up ladders at one in the morning in order to kiss girls while they sleep.

“You don’t think I’m angry, do you? Of course I’m not. I’m very touched. Kiss me, Bertie.”
Well, one has to be civil. I did as directed, but with an uneasy feeling that this was a bit above the odds. I didn’t at all like the general trend of affairs, the whole thing seeming to me to be becoming far too French.

“‘I say,’ I said, ‘Here’s a thought. Why don’ t you marry Percy?”
“But I’m engaged to you,” she faltered, rather giving the impression that she could have kicked herself for being such a chump.
“Oh, that can be readily adjusted,” I said heartily. “Call it off, is my advice. You don’t want a weedy butterfly like me about the home, you want something more in the nature of a soul-mate, a chap with a number nine hat you can sit and hold hands and talk about T.S. Eliot with. And Percy fills the bill.”
“Bertie! You will release me?”
“Certainly, certainly, Frightful wrench, of course, and all that sort of thing, but consider it done.”
“Oh, Bertie!”
She flung herself upon me and kissed me. Unpleasant, of course, but these things have to be faced.