Sorry, daily readers. Thanks to a very bad cold, I can barely breathe. I'm tucked up on the sofa in my office under the laundry I fortunately hung up yesterday when I suspected I would soon be too incapacitated for housework. The sad sad irony is that the weather is absolutely beautiful and May-like, but I don't have the strength to go downstairs and outside.
Feel free to post links to interesting blogs and things in the combox. There is nothing I can do but wait it out and so interesting internet items will help to pass the time. Until then, I am utterly grateful for this huge volume of Agatha Christie.
Update: Oh dear. My head, especially my face, is so wretched and I have read so many Agatha Christie novels that I found myself thinking of my Will. Naturally I made a new Will after I got married because I believe one must be very tidy and up-to-date about legal things. It did take me a long time to get around finding out what marriage actually means in Scotland. Just think: in Scotland B.A can chuck me out of the house and not support me even though we are married. So communist and mean. I have a sneaking suspicion legal marriage in Scotland is just two people living together after a party without any responsibilities whatsoever.
At any rate I keep adding and tearing up bits of my Will depending on how mad I am at my friends that day. My American grandmother banged it into my head from infancy who got what important jewellery when she died, which proved quite useful to my father when she did die. Goodness, how trusting. Although I suppose being a very religious child there was really no way I was going to bump off my gran for a dinner ring.
Last night I felt so deathly that I said an Act of Contrition before I lost consciousness, just in case.
I wish I were a very famous novelist for then people would send me flowers and new books and put straw outside the window to muffle the sound of the shrieking bairns. However, I believe B.A. has gone out to fetch prawn toasties (Scotland's fake Chinese delicacy), so that is something.
What I think I need here are Pet Theories. Naturally my readership decimated itself when I closed up the old shop, but surely there are readers with entertaining and insightful theories about men, romance, dating. makeovers, etc. Christie's are super but I fear they are a teeny bit out of date.
By the way, do you enjoy makeovers in books and films? I love them. I wonder why.
Wednesday 8 April 2015
19 comments:
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The only thing I have to say is.... Agatha Christie!!
ReplyDeleteMy sister and I used to have almost all her books out from the library at once.
Lent has certainly helped cut my 'screen time' and I have been reading and re-reading a lot, currently Emily of New Moon, which although a 'kids' book, I have always loved. I relish the descriptions of landscape, and of weather and of thoughts. I don't write, although as a kid I was an enthusiastic short story writer, but how I wish I had the descriptive talent of LM Montgomery
Ok, enough from me, get well soon, and though I'm but a mostly silent reader, happy Easter, I enjoyed Ceremony of Innocence, (speaking of books...) and don't ever lose your talent for writing fantastic dialog!
Thank you, Clare! I have just been wondering how it is that Christie's heroines manage to be in love with men for years and years without every showing it or anyone finding out. It must be some English or even British thing because I am sure it has always been intensely obvious with me. When I was under 25 I mooned and pined and burst into tears, and when I was over 25 I grinned a lot.
ReplyDeleteI have been pondering the heroine question, maybe it IS a British thing.. I certainly never found it strange, though perhaps it's not the culture, but more to do with the period?? A lot of the social interactions in Christie's books is often in a formal setting, something we don't really understand ('specially in Aus) such as; country houses, Nile cruises, seaside resorts. One has to behave, so one doesn't show one's broken, pining heart. (Only your grandmother/sister or maid would notice)?? These days we can binge on Facebook, moan to our friends at any time via text or whatever. We don't have to 'go to tea' or 'dress for dinner' and we can more often than not be good friends with men without chaperones or all the Great Aunts looking for the engagement ring to appear........??
DeleteI wonder how you would find Australian culture? I have never been to Canada, and to America but once and I found a lot of America very 'alien'. -which I will admit I wasn't expecting. I have a feeling I would be a lot more at home in Britain, although I have but been there long enough to travel from Gatwick to Heathrow by bus, at night.
I found America--Boston, anyway--super-alien, which I wasn't expecting at all! I think Australians might feel more at home in the UK; lots of Aussies come here to work.
DeleteI would love to visit Australia one day, just for the sheer exotica of the landscape, animals, plants, beach culture, etc.
Oh, but I should add that I LOVED visiting the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, partly because everyone was so nice, and partly--I strongly suspect--because my Chicago-born grandma lived in Indiana when I was a kid. Indiana feels "normal"--although I have American friends from all over, so it's a bit of a mystery. I'd love to visit northern California, where one of my best friends comes from, even though I am relatively sure I would find it terrible alien. Yet she is not at all alien!
DeleteThe "beach culture" in Australia is only something you will enjoy if you like beach culture anywhere else in the world. I hate beach culture, so it's just as well I'm from Melbourne, which is probably the least beachy place in Australia aside from, like, Alice Springs or whatever.
DeleteThis a comic video about Melbourne vs. Sydney (please mind the mild swears at the end of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyjVPYnBReE
Love that video!
DeleteAnd not just beach culture, but the general 'no worries' attitude, and we're nowhere near as polite as America. Different food (In Aus we're mainly about chocolate eggs for Easter. When I was in the US, it was all Easter decorations. Chocolate eggs like we know them just didn't exist)
Also random things: apparently the opening of all doors and windows of your house at all times of the year to "let some fresh air in" is a distinctly Aussie thing
Ooooh! I have a cultural question and this is the PERFECT forum for it. I was with my Canadian friend the other day and she said she had just had a hot cross bun for the first time a day previously. I was like, "What? Why did you never eat one back in Toronto?" She said that hot cross buns are not a thing in Canada or the US. That blew my mind. I thought they were international. Are they just a British/Aussie/Kiwi thing?
DeleteWhen I was a child, Toronto had more British people in it, or more people of the British-Canadian majority, and my mother had no problem at all finding hot cross buns during Lent. In Boston there were hot cross buns in the fancy bakeries during Holy Week. If you friend's parents or grandparents emigrated to Toronto from some "minority" nation, than I can see why hot cross buns were not within her orbit.
DeleteNailed it! Her parents are from Hong Kong, which is ironically geographically closer to Australia than Canada.
DeleteAlso, get this -- I find this so amusing -- at a parish I go to, we now apparently have a Young Dating Couples Group. Okay, except that there is, like, ONE young dating (i.e. unmarried) couple. So they're hosting their first event, which is all about couple communication or whatever, and they've invited ALL THE SINGLES who are in the parish's Young Adults Group. I can't go, but anyway, I'm thinking to myself, look, I don't have a problem with communication. I have a problem with not being asked out on dates! Bahahaha!
It seems as if everyone's super happy to help once you're actually dating someone, but no one has, like, ANY IDEA of how to actually make that happen to begin with!
A Young Dating Couples Group? That's just very bizarre. However, the old ways are all in pieces around us, and we're all doing what we can to try to create some kind of flourishing Catholic culture of childhood-studies-courtship-marriage/priesthood/religious life.
DeleteSpeaking as a life-long Torontonian, post-1980 immigrants don't really seem to have much of a clue of what Toronto was like before 1980. I bet there are people whose minds would be blown if they knew that in 1985 there was NOT a forest of Korean and Persian signage stretching from Finch to Steeles and that immediately north of Steeles, in 1980, there were fields, villages, farm houses, horses... and very likely hot cross buns!
Meanwhile, the average child-of-immigrants who never leaves Toronto hasn't the foggiest clue what the rest of Canada is like or what Canadian culture is. The whole concept of "Canadian Culture" has been at war with government sponsored "multiculturalism" since the 1960s, with very strange results and a weird miasma of unhappiness from homesick and chippy immigrants who want to know what Canadian culture is and are left with the conclusion that there isn't one. And Canadian descendants of Canadian veterans of the First World War (like me) either feel sorry for them or resent them. When I was younger, I really resented all the "You Canadians have no culture/decent food/pride/chastity/love of family" crap, but now that I am in Toronto only in February when people are at their most miserable, I feel sorry for the poor immigrants herded on busses after school and work, chilly, covered in melting snow and bound for ugly urban sprawl neighbourhoods, as they all speak some different language into their mobile phones that only any given eighth (at most) of the rest of the people on the bus can understand.
From the second paragraph onwards, you have also described Australia. Except for the snow.
DeleteIs this REALLY what the 1980s were like???
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ow3AD9i9w
(P.S. This will make you laugh, I hope.)
I did laugh, and fortunately I was a child or teenager in the 1980s, so I wasn't attracted to anyone those ages! Except maybe Bruce Boxleitner. I thought he was really cute.
DeletePoor Seraphic! When are you going to put up an amazon wishlist with a range of books so we can send you something nice? I usually like cowboy films, Ealing Comedies or old black and whites. So it was only last night I saw Miss Congeniality. Yes yes her skin, posture and hair was lovely after the makeover but what struck me most was the eyebrows. I have to go get mine shaped professionally again but what I have noticed is that since the invention of wax then coal-black-your-eyebrows our beauty therapists seem to have lost the knack of shaping. A blonde lady I know walked in with Charlie Chaplin eyebrows recently, who does that to a customer????
ReplyDeleteSinéad.
Go to someone who does threading. I think they're usually good.
DeleteI hope you feel better soon, Seraphic!
ReplyDeleteTheories about romance..... Here's a theory: until you're actually dating someone, don't have meaningful contact with them twice in a row without contacting some other guy in between. "Meaningful contact" is anything that makes your heart beat faster, like a phone call, or a flirty text or whatever.
Now, I know--my first reaction was like "what the heck, it's not like they're beating down the door or anything!"
But it works like this: If you just had a phone conversation with John, you can't contact him again unless you've done something like send a friendly email to your (single and eligible) friend Jake first. Then, suppose you go out with John. You must text that shy guy Jasper who sings in the choir and invite him to a volleyball game or something, BEFORE you can contact John again. Of course, John is allowed to contact YOU whenever he wants. But you can't reply until you've done your homework.
I tried it, and found that it actually helps keep a check on developing a premature crush on John ;-) Plus, it keeps you open to other possibilities, makes for packed social calendar, and helps take the pressure off getting to know John!
Whoa. That is way more up-to-date than me. All that blatant men-contacting. I'm still pondering the plusses and minuses of asking men at swing-dancing to dance.
DeleteNow that is interesting about Charlie Chaplin. I go in and tell the beauty therapist exactly what I want, especially as it isn't really in style at the moment. Julia's right. Threading is good too.
ReplyDeleteI actually have an Amazon wishlist, but not on my blog. I have always been a bit shy about that.