I have spent most of today tidying my study. This is a somewhat doomladen process, as the process of reshelving books reveals inevitably that somehow one has ended up shelving a new book in the space of the old one which has spent 18 months at the bottom of a heap and there is NO […]
Miss Dog has had Miss Best Friend to stay for a day or two. There have been numerous meetings of the Silly Bitch Club and, naturally, many opportunities to practise their chosen careers as Consumer Watchdogs. The four melting brown eyes on every mouthful got, in the end, on the Lady Novelist’s nerves sufficiently for […]
We had a spectacular snow day yesterday; that sort of fine, dry, feathery snow which forms crusty blobs on just about everything — every branch, rail, fencewire with an airy burden of white, an inch or more high. Hokusai snow. It ended up as something of a day off — Tayla’s school closed, and for […]
And hold the front page — we were electrified to observe yesterday, atop our very own Rayburn, a giant bamboo. Since joined by a friend. It’s too exciting. Actually at the moment it is a blade of grass half an inch high, but as someone said of St Denis walking a mile after his […]
I have spent sizeable chunks of the last two days making a model of the Globe Theatre. Those of you who knew me from Warwick days will probably realise that it would take quite a lot of persuasion to get me that near thespianity in general & the world of the unlamented Emerald Eel in […]
I have just turned forty-six. On the webnews this evening, Ms Catherine Deneuve was saying that from a Hollywood perspective, life was over at 45. Well, nobody who has seen me in the plentiful flesh would describe me as a professional beauty, but I do find that a little sad. At 46, I find that […]
The household has gone amazingly up in the world — we have just taken delivery of two theatre posters by Edward Gorey, one for a work of his own called Tinned Lettuce, featuring a sailor-suited child in flight from a rampant Webbs’ Wonder some 20 feet high, the other an indescribably sinister poster for […]
I was on the Net yesterday looking for info about Kubrick’s The Shining — I was writing a review of a book about D. H. Lawrence & wanted to make a passing mention of the way that the concept of the Lawrentian Author had justified a fair amount of male bad behaviour and was reflected […]
I’ve spent a fair chunk of today rather strangely engaged, making a Mills & Boon bookcover. This is by way of a complicated wind-up; our friend Helen the Antique Dealer has acquired a boyfriend who, though a man of many parts, can in her view be just a touch stodgy; she is redesigning his study, […]
The Apparitional Gamekeeper came by after lunch, and observed that the wild geese had settled on a neighbour’s field. We all went off to see; at a couple of hundred yard’s distance, a patch of rising ground, backed with pinewood, was black with them. For hours they kept coming, the sky was full of their […]
Les animaux went to the vet today. What a carry-on. Miss Dog seems to be auditioning for the Death of Nelson or thereabouts, trembling, whining, rolling her eyes & having sensibility (or possibly, fenfibility) like something out of an eighteenth century novel. And it was just for booster shots, for heaven’s sake; the little animal […]