I have been internet shopping. I had been unaware of this pleasure until alerted to the website of the Dull Men's Club of Great Britain by Leland Carlson, the club's assistant vice president and author of Dull Men of Great Britain. 'This book will send you to sleep,' he warned. This was not criticism but praise.
Quite apart from the website's rather thought-provoking observation that time is a wonderful thing, because otherwise everything would happen at the same time, he was certain that absolutely no one could wish to know more about Belgium's constitutional crisis of 2007 than the book told them (he has obviously not met that prince among men, Herman Van Rompuy, former president of the European Council, whose appetite for matters such as these was gargantuan). The book contains riveting insights into railway gauges, disquisitions on byzantine bureaucracy, and the arithmetical aspects of knitting a cardigan. It does not hold back on Porphyry's Neoplatonism.