Abdiel

Look at this -

O Heaven! That such resemblance of the Highest
Should yet remain, where faith and realty
Remain not; wherefore should not strength and might
There fail where virtue fails, or weakest prove
Where boldest, though to sight unconquerable?
His puissance, trusting to th' Almighty's aid
I mean to try, whose reason I have tried
Unsound and false; nor is it aught but just
That he who in debate of truth hath won
Should win in arms, in both disputes alike
Victor; though brutish that contést and foul,
When reason hath to deal with force, yet so
Most reason is that reason overcome.

There's to be a staging of Milton's words in early July (not all of them. That would be mad.) and I auditioned yesterday. I said, of course, that I would just be pleased to be asked at all, but that's a LIE - I want Abdiel. I really really want Abdiel.

(Abdiel is the angel who initially was swayed by Lucifer's 'Non serviam', but thought better of it. That's the angel opposing Satan, who with his legions is assaulting the throne of Heaven. I may have to post some more of this later - it's FANTASTIC.)

See?

If it's better to give

then who on earth do the givers give to? This week, as 'appen, ME.

Lilies from Anisa, all tightly furled. One of my favourite things EVER is to watch flowers slowly burst into bloom, and lilies are spectacularly good for this - a miracle on my own mantlepiece. And, just as they reached full perfection, Significant Other asked, sobbing, if we could please throw them out.


Pollen allergy. Bah.






My mother, returning from a couple of months in South Africa, bore a box (shaped like a star, coloured crackly antique gold, with a BEJEWELLED top) full of shells.







And Rachael, who is an Autumn, occasionally buys Spring stuff by mistake, and then gives it to me.

I'm dreaming of a white . . .

. . . Easter?

Makes a change, though, doesn't it? Daffodils peeking through the snowdrifts, long weekend picnic plans all awry because you weren't banking on snow, and Easter Egg hunts . . .

Oh, Easter Egg hunts in the snow. The outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible FIB. All those little darlings asking why, if the Easter Bunny really exists, each egg is hidden at the end of a line of size eleven trainer tracks.


PS I should have mentioned that this Easter Egg hunt took place in the churchyard. (Eostre must have been laughing all over her lovely green face.) It was a churchwarden's rather brilliant ploy to get the kids out before the next service. So there were all these lovely Christian folk defending the existence of a pagan God's totem. In the churchyard.

Valkyrie. Even Hippolyta would be better.

I have mentioned before my appallment that 'Amazon' should be called 'Amazon', and not something starting with a letter a great deal further down the alphabet. Any letter, just not bloody blimmin' A, is all. ANYTHING that takes that line OK OK! THOSE LINES! Happy now?

Where was I before I got all defensive and shouty? Oh yes - anything that takes those lines down past the fold in the credit card statement, so they are not THE FIRST THINGS Significant Other SEES.

Which would be great, no? Unless - unless . . .



Yup. EVERY SINGLE LINE ON MY LAST STATEMENT.

Trades Descriptions Act

This really should have been exciting, I promise you. I'd been led to expect fireworks of one sort or another - either a lot of Scandinavian berserking, or a fjord-ful of tears, arms around the shoulders and vows of eternal amity.

But no - another half-arsed solution to a half-arsed irritant. What is with them? So both men thrive on bitter, nagging relationships, fractured by wilful misunderstanding and patched up by the threat of losing their livelihoods if they don't work together - what do they think wives are for?

The honeymoon is over

I believe I already mentioned accdentally calling Significant Other a incompetent fool all over the interwebthingy. When he really really is not, it was clearly an error in translation, somebody has swapped around all the keys on my keyboard for a joke and I knew not what I typed, or possibly (just possibly. By a whisker) the incompetent foolness of Insignificant Other. (If women are the fair sex, does that make men the unfair sex? If a man utters an opinion, and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?)

Well He Has Had A Good Run. But he is The Golden Boy no longer. He had his chance, and made his mark, and carved his niche, but now the fun has to stop. The party is over, the easy wins are all won.

Poor fellow has been having difficulties with a local bloke in the Norwegian IT department (I know. What an exotic working life he has) and emailed his boss in Germany (it just gets more exciting, doesn't it?) to ask for a confab about said difficulties, and the German boss emailed back, copying Norwegian Man.

SO is coming back tonight from a brace of days there, and I dare say there is no way I can avoid hearing all about it.

On the other hand, it might be worth paying attention because it may be the next post . . .

Recipe

Heat the oven to 180°C / 350°F. Brush a 20cm removable-base tin with melted butter, and dust with ground almonds.

Melt together 300g plain chocolate (min. 60% cocoa), 275g caster sugar, 165g unsalted butter and a pinch of salt. Remove from the heat.

Whisk five large eggs together with a tablespoon of ground almonds, and fold into the chocolate mixture. Bake for 35 - 40 minutes.

To cool, remove the base of the tin, carefully burning yourself on the forearm and tipping the entire confection onto the top of your gas hob, ensuring you get sufficient quantities into the hard-to-reach areas under the pan support grids.

Swear Significant Other to grave-like secrecy. Your secrecy, his grave.

Thanking the good Lord in Heaven that you cleaned your hob-top within living memory, pick out enough bits to fill four bowls, and put the bowls into the fridge. Put the remainder into a fifth bowl, and pick at this for the next two hours, while you are preparing dinner for your guests.

Hope that you got all the bits of last week's rice out, and serve with crossed fingers and cream.

(The ingredients and method are from the competely fantastic Green & Black cookbook. The presentation is all mine.)

(And I can't even blog this on my RL blog, because they will read it.)

Stardust

. . . was charming, thank you. I very much enjoyed the comic when it came out, and was disappointed when I didn't get to a cinema to see the movie, so I treated myself to the DVD immediately it came out.

Charlie Thing was very good, Claire Danes miscast, Michelle Pfeiffer beautiful, Rickie Gervais predictable, and Robert de Niro a hoot. And I didn't mind at all the divergences in plot, except for the ending, which was awful. So much better in the comic.

But what I didn't get was why, out of all the favourable reviews, and there were quite a few, the DVD distributors decide to quote the Daily Mail* on the back, and, on a specially commissioned sticker on the front, the Sun**. Neil Gaiman himself was part of the production team, and surely he can't have lived abroad so long he's forgotten what these two newspapers are like?

I've always struggled against intellectual snobbery*** but for the life of me I can't see why the makers of this movie thought that the readership of the Mail and the Sun was an appropriate demographic at which to aim.

Shows just how much I know.

* The Mail is legendarily a bastion of knee-jerk right wing xenophobic prejudice, and even if it actually isn't, it's become a national stereotype, and 'a Daily Mail reader' is cultural shorthand for describing a knee-jerk right wing xenophobe.

**The Sun has a picture of a naked woman on page three every day, and no-one knows what is on the other pages. Or cares. And 'Page Three' is cultural shorthand for - well, naked woman with big breasts. All shot in the best possible taste. And anyway, these women enjoy it, and they are genuinely talented, and it's the first step on theit road to stardom. Or some such.

***that's a lie

A Week Without a Washing machine

Yesterday saw an emergency dash to John Lewis as (did I really just type that? 'Emergency Dash to John Lewis'? How horribly middle-class.) our washing machine finally collapsed. Our painstakingly-researched (or possibly, 'Here's the first one in the row. WE'LL TAKE IT!) selected model won't be delivered until Friday. In the mean time, as we were due at SO's folks today to celebrate various birthdays, we packed up all the washing, both sopping wet from the busted machine, and fresh (HAH!) from the laundry basket, and ruthlessly exploited the in-lawful, and fully functional, washing machine. Twice.

All worth it to hear his mother muttering, 'Forty six years old and still brings his washing home. . .')