conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Drawing, Love, Blind with the genre: Self-Help, Relationships?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Love Is Blind'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first five paragraphs for this book. End with the sentence ' It doesn't matter, Brodie told himself, they're only your family, that's all—people you can leave and forget if you've a mind to.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Love Is Blind
  Brodie thought of Edinburgh and Channon's—the life he'd lived once. He called to mind images of Liethen Manor and his family, feeling no nostalgia or melancholy. Something about his new life—his life with Lika—convinced him that he would never return home, never return to Scotland. And then he did feel a moment's sadness: thinking of his brothers and sisters and their circumscribed conditions. Here he was on a terrace of a café in the south of France looking out at the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean. Escape, flight, freedom—that was the only solution. Perhaps he'd write to them and urge them to leave.
  Brodie finished his drink and strolled home, pondering the letter he'd compose. To Callum, he thought, then Callum could pass it round to the others. Perhaps it was what they needed. A jolt, a catalyst—the prospect of new horizons.
  When he stepped into the apartment Lika was already there—and he knew instantly something was wrong. Her face was set, her chin buckled slightly as she tried to control her emotions.
  She stood up and began to walk around the room, clenching her fists and then shaking her fingers, as if they were sore.
  Brodie looked out of the train window. It was raining and the Borders landscape was drab, drenched and barren-looking as the line crossed a stretch of treeless khaki moorland. Beyond, unhedged, unwalled, sheepless hillsides climbed to meet the enfolding grey-flannel sky. Scotland at its most uncompromising. He felt weak, unmanned somehow, as if a more craven, helpless Brodie Moncur had parasitically occupied his body and spirit. It doesn't matter, Brodie told himself, they're only your family, that's all—people you can leave and forget if you've a mind to.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He sealed the envelope, addressed it to the Paris shop, affixed stamps and slipped it in his jacket pocket. He filled César's bowl with water and set it down on a German newspaper on the floor by the unlit fire. This room was all he really needed, he thought, given his meagre possessions. He had the use of a bathroom and lavatory at the end of the corridor outside. As with all the lodgings he rented the assumption he made was that he'd occupy them for a few weeks, at the most a month or two, but in fact he'd been at this address on the Via San Michele for well over a year, now, since he'd arrived in Trieste in September 1904. And now it was November 1905...The room also had a view of the Castello from its solitary window and he was only a ten-minute walk from his place of work.
  He patted César goodbye and pulled on his greatcoat, setting his old felt trilby on his head. As he left the building, he paused and looked up and down the street, casually, but searching for anyone lurking, watching. It was a reflex now, something he did automatically, having been followed, one way or another, through the various European cities he had lived and worked in over the past few years. But he saw nothing untoward. Carriages and wagons and a few automobiles—another crisp, sunny autumn day in Trieste, this curious Austro-Hungarian city, full of Italians, nestling at the top of the Adriatic Sea. He was just another foreigner in a city of foreigners—Italians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Greeks and a dozen other nationalities all drawn to this vast port—the Hamburg of the Mediterranean. If there was a perfect city in which to find anonymity—to disappear—then Trieste was ideal.
  He posted his letter in the yellow letter box, adorned with its imperial black double-headed eagle, and strolled on towards Nicolo-Piano where he worked part-time. It was owned by Gabriele Nicolo, a plump energetic man in his fifties, who sold and repaired pianos in a shop on the Via Malcantan behind the Piazza Grande. At the rear of the shop front on Via Malcantan there was a big roofed-in yard where the repair work was done and the pianos stored. In summer you could hear the bands playing in the piazza. Brodie had been working there for eight months now, principally repairing pianos, but he had introduced the idea of a tuning service and it was proving successful. Brodie was training up a young apprentice called Gianluca Geppa—a skinny, studious lad—and was contemplating hiring another, such was the demand.
  He pushed open the rear door to the yard, smelling the wood, the glue and the resin, and realizing that these odours were a constant in his professional life. Amongst all the jobs that had begun and ended in Edinburgh, Paris, Biarritz, Nice, Geneva, Vienna, Graz and now Trieste, these smells had never changed. Same job, same smells—circumstances always unique.
  In the corner of the yard was a small wooden shed with a stove that functioned as a rudimentary office and as a retreat for him, Gianluca and Ottavio the carpenter. Brodie's Italian was about as good as his German so communication was halting and heavily gestural, though broadly efficacious. Gabriele Nicolo spoke some French and wanted to learn English—he had enrolled at the Berlitz school in Trieste—and was happy to have employed an English-speaker as well as an excellent tuner.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last four paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: He saw a shape, like the map of an unknown island, that turned into Lika's face. Then he saw the skein of geese flying low over the Neva river. He saw the deer at Maloe Nikolskoe look up from its grazing and stare at him. He saw Lika come through the door and walk towards him smiling. "Brodie!" she called. "I'm here!" And he felt tears fill his eyes—an eerie sense of happiness, of other-worldly well-being filled him.
  Dr. Klein stood up and rummaged busily in his bag and Brodie turned to see what he was doing but his spectacles were on the bedside table. He tried to reach for them, ordered his hand to move but it wouldn't. Dimly, blurrily, Brodie was aware of Dr. Klein opening what looked like a bottle of champagne. A golden gleam of foil, its rip then a pause and a dull pop as the cork was removed. Brodie heard a tumbler filled. His fingers were fitted round it and it was guided to his lips.
  Clive Ackroyd, Patrick Doyle, Chloé van Soeterstède, Patrick Neil Doyle, the estate of Ernst Sauter, Aleksandr Markevich.
  Professor Donald Rayfield, Dr. David T. Evans, Sam M. Goodforth, Mélisande Sautoy, Dr. Dermot O'Flynn.