Fans!
This weekend I visited a fabulous little antiquarian bookshop, Evergreen Livres, in the historic market town of Stow on the Wold. It's the sort of bookshop I can easily go mad in and spend a fortune on out of print historical reference books. It has a great stock of unusual and reasonably priced books, the owners are very friendly and they have a cute dog - all recommendations as far as I'm concerned. One of the books I picked up was about fans. I have been aware of the language of fans for a while, although I knew nothing about what the different signals meant. Now I can see how you could build an entire story around this clever and complicated art. Some of my favourite gestures/ messages are: Placing the fan on the left ear - I wish to get rid of you. Drawing the fan across the forehead - You have changed. Covering the left ear with the open fan - Do not betray our secret I can see a couple of difficulties here, not least that some of these gestures seem quite odd and might ...