Nearly halfway there . . .

I'm bloody EXHAUSTED. Every time I forget that, while on the whole our holidays together are a success, SO's and my approaches to our joint time off differ in one or two key aspects. Well, one aspect really. He is SO BLIMMIN' UP-AND-AT-'EM! Can't have five minutes go by without hearing 'So what are we going to do today?' My favourite answer, always bitten back, is 'Bloody NOTHING! Why can't we just read our books for a bit!'

Especially as, oh yes, did I mention it's RAINING? (OK, not the entire time. Yesterday was quite nice, but that meant that Watergate Bay, which is indeed very lovely, was extremely crowded. Still lovely though.) Lovely weather for finding somewhere comfy, with a ready supply of good coffee, and reading.

Not a chance in Hell.

Day One - a cold, windy beach, Day Two - A cold, damp and VERY windy day mooching around Newquay, NOT finding a decent cup of coffee, a pair of Crocs that didn't make me look like Donald Duck or even a half-way decent boat in the harbour to look at. Bleurgh. Day Four - Watergate, and lovely. Day Four - ah. Now this was great. We visited Trerice again. It is SO PERFECT. If we could, we'd buy the place off the National Trust and set up home there. The grounds are laid out with a perfect balance between decorative, working and recreational, and the house itself is small (for an Elizabethan manor) and elegant. Go see this place. It's balm to the troubled soul, and to the weary, peace.

Dunno why I'm posting, when I could be reading Rankin Davis' 'Hung Jury'. So far, so gripping.

We're off. See you in August.

Book Meme

Ten Writers who Need to be Beaten With A Bat Until They Stop.

I'm going to have to stick with seven, because - well, because I can't think of any more. Maybe I'll do the other three later.


1. Thomas Hardy. (Read a lot because I had to - Eng.Lit A-level, then a degree.) The man was an unrelenting doom merchant, so up to his eyebrows in the tragedy of the Common Man he couldn't see the sun shine. (Unless he bent over, of course. No, that was gratuitous.) Jude the Obscure! How penny-dreadful can you get! I can't tell you in detail, of course, you may read it and you really shouldn't be forewarned. The Mayor of Casterbridge - now that was a laugh a page. Like 24 without the mobile phones.

2. Ernest Hemingway. (Read half Death in the Afternoon. Really really coudln't get any further, and I don't give up easy.) Everything First Nations said. Every page reeks of booze and self-justification.


3.Stephen Donaldson. (Read two tomes. Where did my life go!) Thomas Covenant! This should have been so good! Huge sprawling canvas, hero with an interesting flaw, cast of thousands, in-fighting, out-fighting, you name it. But you know what they say - good on paper, lousy in bed. So boring I can't remember how boring it actually was. Still, a page or two and I was sound asleep, so it did have its uses.

4.Cicero. (Latin A-level.) Oh, Cicero. Golden Age of the language, a man right at the heart of the Mightiness That Was Rome, mover, shaker, not given to losing his head. (Or his hands.) But Oh. My. Gosh. All of that fabulous vocabulary, the elegant sentence structure, the meter, the rhythm, and all he could do was character assassination. I'd have voted for Catiline. Mind you, I have not read Imperium, or seen Rome II yet, so there is a chance that years and years and years after leaving school my opinion might be changed. I will, of course, keep you posted. Because you are aching to know.

5.Paul Coelho. (Veronica Decides to Die. No actually, it's Mangonel who badly needs to pop her clogs.) What is it with this man? He has a HUGE following in South and Central America, every time he farts he must earn a squazillion Oreos, or whatever the local currency is, and The Man. Writes. Pap. Earnest, crap-mystical, feel-good PAP. Life's not like that - it's nasty, brutish and short, and he needs to get that into his rich glass-half-full head.

6.Torey Hayden, Dave Pelzer et al. (None. These guys should be top of my list, and I haven't read ONE.) Look at the list of subjects Wikipedia gives for Hayden - autism, Tourette syndrome, sexual abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, selective mutism. It makes me so sad and angry that people's hideous experiences should be turned into after-dinner conversation. I don't care that they know what they are talking about, they should have the professional responsibility not to turn suffering on this scale into voyeuristic schlock.

7.St Paul (Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians etc.) Or maybe he should be top. The others exposed human misery, he imposed it. On a colossal scale. Now, I know that what the man achieved is world-shaking. (He was the bloke who broke with the Disciples, who wanted to preach exclusively to Jews, and took The Word to the Gentiles across the known world. Himself. HUGE.) His place in history is assured. But my problem with Paul is that he was writing out of the belief that the Second Coming was due in his own lifetime. All his prescriptions and proscriptions had an acknowleged shelf life of about 50 years. He SPECIFICALLY counselled against social change, because the Kingdom of God was at hand. And 2,000 years later we are still cribb'd, cabin'd and confined by strictures 1950 years past their use-by date. The big trouble I have with any theodicy is that it always reflects what Man wants, not what God wants. And Paul was the bloke who started it. (And no, by 'Man' I do not mean to include women. 'He for God only, she for God in him.' Milton, I know, and beautifully phrased, but poisonous nevertheless.) *

COMING SOON!

8, 9 and 10.

I tag Betty, because. She knows why. And Dave - judging by the books appearing in his sidebar, we have very similar tastes in the good stuff. But do we hate the same crap?

*Dunno why I went with a Milton quote, when Paul himself would have done just as well. Paul did, after all write beautifully. Well, at least according to King James he did.

In the meantime . . .

Here's a story from my friend E. She can't post this because she blogs real life, and the subject, or an acquaintance, may find it. So I'm going to do it for her!

'Re the ****** rector. I have been collating a list of stories evidencing his ‘eccentricity’. The latest is that from an occasion when there was a visiting children’s choir from Lithuania. They were scheduled to have drinks and nibbles at the Rectory as part of their visit, and arrived, were shown to the drawing room by Mrs Rector, and thence out through the French windows into the garden. In the garden, the Rector waved merrily to them from his task, and said, “With you in a moment!”. Gasps of horror from assembled Lithuanian kiddywinkles, as he was engaged in disembowelling a deer, and was red to the elbows. In his back garden. And actually I think the technical term is ‘gralloching’, and I don’t even know how I know that.'

Ain't country life grand!

The dog is eating my homework

First Nations tagged me to produce a list of ten writers who, in my opinion, need hitting with a bat until they stop.

It's proving unexpectedly difficult. Of course I can think of some, who can't, but ten? Thing is, I don't on the whole remember chapter and verse of writers that make my eyes bleed - I get them out of the way and move on to the next thing. I suppose I could pad the list with generics like 'extreme right-wing authors, such as the architects of Apartheid, the authors of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Leviticus' but I have a feeling that would be cheating - I think I have to Name Names.

I'm up to seven, and I want to get this over with by Friday, as we leave for Cornwall over the weekend. (Just outside Newquay, since you ask.)

Oh oh oh I forgot to say, the reason I don't know exactly when we are going away, is that SO is in Moscow for the week. Tee hee! He buys a deeply lovely little car, then goes away for a week, and the minute he is back we head west for ten days, not in the car!

Mid-life crisis? What mid-life crisis?

A test drive! That's where he said he was going! And did I want to come too! As 'appens I was busy, and came home to find THIS on my doorstep.

'I didn't think you'd mind' he said. 'It's an Audi.'

How well he knows me.

If it walks like a duck . . .

I thought I'd better see for myself what this Second Life hoo-hah was all about. This in spite of not being awfully interested in pop music of any stripe, not madly interested in fashion, and not even slightly interested in, God forbid, Meeting New People. But hey, it's the same basis on which I once read a Barbara Cartland novel - I wanted to know what I was talking about. A rare enough stance for me - normally I'm perfectly happy to deliver lengthy opinions based on little more than headlines read from other people's papers, and them usually upside down. And it meant another detailed questionnaire. I love them - so probing.

A pretty cool bit was Choosing a Handle. Well - half of it was cool, because I was always gonna be Mangonel Something, wasn't I. The uncool bit was that they don't let you choose your own surname - well they do, but it's from a list of about 100 presets, of varying degrees of coolness. 'Aabye'? 'Barzane'? 'Cioc'? After to-ing and fro-ing up and down the list a coupla times, and declaiming the possibilities out loud (in front of a mirror. With a hairbrush for a mike. 'Ladeez and Gentlemen! Heee-ee-e-eee-re's Mangonel Etchegarayyyyyy!') I settled on a beautiful name.

Mangonel Anatine.

Isn't that lovely? It has internal alliteration, it's duodactylic, it feels good in the mouth. It has umami.

I signed myself up. I thought to myself, 'What a cool name! Wouldn't it be even cooler if it actually meant something? Yeah sure, Mangonel I'm pretty happy with, but Anatine? I know! Let's go Google!'


An´a`tine - (Zool.) Of or pertaining to the ducks; ducklike.





Well.

I said No. NO WAY. Uh-huh. Not me, no sirree Bob. I refused, withdrew my service, and cancelled the subscription.

And then changed my mind. (They say men's minds are dirtier than women's. Women change theirs more often.) I decided hey! Ducks are pretty cool! Especially shredded, with spring onions and plum sauce, wrapped in a pancake. The thought of that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, why not share the joy?

And then changed my mind when they wanted a WHOPPING $9.99 to reactivate the account I'd had for 14 seconds, and had cancelled about a minute and a half before. $9.99! So now I have to wait until 31st August before I can try again. But I will. You betcha. Quack.

It was lovely, thanks

We passed unscathed by the mares of Diomedes, and greeted the Three Sisters. Quite an exciting walk, all in all.

And in Northleach to pay my respects to my C15 Uncle John Fortey, found Christ Risen.













Rivergirl proposed a bijou blogmeetette, as Burford is in her neck of the woods. There's very little I would have liked more, but I don't know how I would have explained her. You see, SO doesn't know about this little hobby of mine. (At least not to my knowledge he doesn't. I haven't told him, and I'd know if he found out - he is crap at keeping stuff to himself.) So telling him I have an imaginary friend, and then actually introducing this imaginary friend, may pop a fuse or two. (Or may not. Don't wanna find out right now. Maybe another time.)

RG - raincheck?