Five leaves left

• I saw the moon last night as I was putting the milk bottles out on the doorstep: a big bright full moon, certainly, but no more super than many others. To be fair, that's all that was promised: the far point of the swing of the pendulum. durham_rambler, getting up in the night, opened the curtains and saw the moon low over the trees on the hillside. This was more impressive, he tells me, and that too is as promised: the moon always looks bigger when there's a point of reference. (I didn't get up to look).



• To the Eye Infirmary this morning for the Come back in six months to make sure it's not getting worse. It's not getting worse, so they've discharged me. It's not getting better, either, though my right eye is better than expected. I'll settle for that. And a pleasant drive there and back, in autumn sunshine and plenty of golden foliage.



• Pretty pictures in The Guardian of the extraordinary versions of traditional rugs by Azerbaijani artiat Faig Ahmed: I had to read the article twice to convince myself that these are real physical rugs, not digital manipulations. (More on the artist's website).



• These book sculptures are all over the web, though the artists's own website seems to have gone missing. At times they veer further into cuteness and whimsy than works for me, but at their best they are delightful: and I like that each sculpure represents the book from which it is made.



• Shopping triumph! I have bought a pair of slippers. Limited triumph, because given absolute choice, I would not necessarily have chosen lilac, with a snowflake design incorporating a sparkly center in each snowflake. I chose them because they fit me, and that in itself is triumph enough. I celebrated by throwing away their heelless and very grubby predecessors.

OK, the bridge, or someplace, later

Listening to the news the other morning, half asleep, and the tributes to Leonard Cohen, I heard the anouncer mention "his greatest hit" and automatically thought of Suzanne: I came up to university with a copy of 'Songs of Leonard Cohen' and found that half the college had their own copies - and quite a few people had 'Songs from a Room', too. Those are the songs that got under my skin, that throw up phrases when I'm thinking of something else.

Nothing that came later got as close to me - although when durham_rambler and I watched the Omnibus profile that appeared on the iPlayer, I was surprised how much of it I knew, and how well. But it was as if he'd vanished in the intervening years: he hadn't, of course, but I hadn't been paying attention. I know exactly when I did start to pay attention again: it was in 1994, when I saw Atom Egoyan's Exotica: Everybody Knows isn't quite the only thing I remember about the film (which I liked very much) but it stands out.

Looking for that date, I found this interesting article about Cohen's inadvertent brilliance in scoring film soundtracks - where I also learned some things I had not known about Leonard Cohen's greatest hit. Yes, of course it's Hallelujah. I knew that really (when I'm awake), though bear in mind that as I was saying, your greatest hit is likely not to be my favourite. Actually, I'd go further: some time ago, I wrote about 'those songs', big emotional anthems to which I also have an adverse reaction. I owe the word 'anthems' to commenters who took a more rounded, less irritable view of the phenomenon that I did. Now, I don't think that Hallelujah as we heard Leonard Cohen sing it in that Omnibus footage is one of those siongs - but by the time k.d. lang has finished with it, oh, yes, and brilliantly so, I wouldn't have it any other way. And apparently the transformation was effected by the unexpected alliance of John Cale and Shrek. I may need to go and lie down to think about that.

Meanwhile, courtesy of sovay, Hallelujah in Yiddish. Of course.