"Shadows never grow old. That Romanesque church casts the same youthful shadow as when the church was first completed."

"Deep down in wells, the discs of the moon are dreaming".

"When we sit on the edge of the bed, we are convicts reflecting on our sentence".

I've just bought a fabulous book called Greguerías: The Wit and Wisdom of Ramón Gómez de la Serna (selected, introduced and translated by Philip Ward). I've mentioned Ramón, as he is known, on the blog before. One of the great writers on Madrid, and the author of perhaps the definitive history of the Puerta del Sol, this "Picasso of literature" also invented the greguería, which is something like an adage, a one-liner, a pun, a joke, all rolled into one and with something added. Every PdS blog post for the foreseeable future will come prefaced by one of these mini-masterpieces. (We'll start off with the three above.) They're not all politically correct: he lived in his times. But they are better than that: they are true.

The book is published by the Oleander Press, and on the backleaf of the 1982 edition I have, other Oleander books are advertised, including Enlightenment Through the Art of Basketball by Hirohide Ogawa, Libyan Mammals by Ernst Hufnagl and Darts: 50 Ways to Play the Game by Jabez Gotobed. That's 49 more ways than I was aware of. Long live the Oleander Press.