Evening all. Am home again after meet-up, returning to an illing child and a knackered DH. Illing child has improved considerably since he's eaten, but still generating enough heat to power the radiators.
Hope miniLetUs has a good trip, and that decoratign his room goes well. Well done to Badders and WW for being energetic and productive. (and a compass) for Apricot 
The photo of Tom and Ali was from a trip to Scotland earlier this month - apparently one/both of them was doing some promo work for the Highland tourist board
More re. last night's reading, since Madame was asking. They read all of Part 4 of the book - which has no suicides or other deaths in Charlotte's family, and no direct persecution of Jews. So one of the more cheery parts 
They finished with a section of Part 5, which was a description of the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, which resulted in Kristallnacht. Just in case we were trying to kid ourselves that all would end happily
The book itself is an interesting format in that it's laid out as a sentence per line and almost like a poem. It's the more impressive for being translated from the original French. (Maybe the original French is even more powerful, but since my French is no-where near good enough to read a book, I have no idea ) The author describes the life of Charlotte Salomon and intersperses the story with information about his own research and the present day locations of the story. This made it slightly confusing during the reading, when at one point it really wasn't clear that they had gone from talking about the characters, to talking about the present day locations.
We also liked the venue - galleried library with wood panelling and a sculpted end wall - library porn! Additions were discussed such as globes and wheeled ladders to slide along the shelves
The venue also had a nice cafe with slightly (very) disorganised staff an little tealights on the tables, meaning that someone was able to set fire to their napkin on accident at the end of the night