I got to hang around a hospital for most of the day while my girlfriend had some wisdom teeth extracted. This had the following advantages:

• I had to turn off my phone. All day. Work could wait.

• I didn't bring my laptop, either. My hands could get some (much needed) rest. Work could wait.

• Everything was quiet, apart from the background noise of nurses shuffling back and forth and the occasional passing tram. Silence is golden even if, as John Cage discovered, it doesn't really exist as such.

So as a side-effect of all this, I was able to sit down and concentrate on making my way through Robin Kinross' 2nd edition of Modern Typography - it was a bit hard-going through some of the drier parts when there were too many distractions around (maybe I'm just getting old), but it was certainly satisfying to finish it, even if I'll probably never be able to pronounce Jan Tschichold's surname correctly. I'll just have to make sure I don't name-drop him aurally. Or something.

In retail therapy news, I've ordered me one of these, as well as the two alva noto / ryuichi sakamoto releases, after discovering that I had one of the tracks on the companion CD to David Toop's book Haunted Weather: music, silence and memory, but hadn't been paying attention to how wonderful it sounded.