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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) 17catherines | |
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I went to Reader's Feast today, my voucher burning a hole in my pocket. I was actually looking for a tome on confectionary and chocolate making, but I had no luck in this quest. What I did find was a book titled 'An Abundance of Katherines'. The back cover blurb starts with the word '19 Katherines and counting'. Really, I have no choice in the matter. If I'm going to wander around the internets with a name like 17catherines, I'm fairly sure it is my civic duty to read and review this book on my livejournal. Expect revelations soon! And yesterday we had Shakespeare. I must say, Measure for Measure is a strange little play. ( Read more... )In other news, I am very pleased about Masterchef. Not just because Julie won, which makes me happy in its own right, but because both Poh and Julie cooked really well. Since they are both cooks who are entirely capable of going into tailspins and producing disasters, the main thing I was hoping for were that they would both cook well, and that whoever won would win because she cooked better, not because the other cooked poorly. Which is what happened. Also, Andrew is sick. Possibly with flu. So we're not being especially sociable this week (I'm really hoping we won't be quarantined, because that is not how I want to spend my holiday). Naturally, today is the first day in some time when Andrew's agency clearly had lots of work going - apparently they called him twice this morning. Sigh... Current Mood: tired
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ringbark | |
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Good morning. It seems that my Twitter posts no longer appear here regularly and I may take the time to find out why. Meanwhile, it's pretty much been more of the same. We've moved offices from Bishopsgate to near London Bridge. The building is pleasant enough, but it's not in the City, where things happen. In recent weeks, David visited London on his way to Edmonton, AB. Matthew took a short visit too and Viv was able to spend a couple of nights in London while Christopher was on a school trip to France/Belgium to look at battlefields and cemeteries. Matthew went off to Newquay last week for an end-of-school road trip, except that these days the boys fly. Manchester to Newquay by air? What's happening to our world? Elsewhere, I have caught up with some old friends, some in real life, some online. Hard work at the Bank, though possibly not so bad as a few weeks or a few months ago. Tonight, another night at the start of a week in Wembley. How about you, my occasional readers? Do any of you ever pass through or near Wembley, Kensington or London Bridge? Or, perish the thought, will any of you be in Malta at the end of July/start of August? Current Mood:  tired
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) pepysdiary | |
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http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1666/07/19/ Up in very good health in every respect, only my late fever got by my pain do break out about my mouth. So to the office, where all the morning sitting. Full of wants of money, and much stores to buy, for to replenish the stores, and no money to do it with, nor anybody to trust us without it. So at noon home to dinner, Balty and his wife with us. By and by Balty takes his leave of us, he going away just now towards the fleete, where he will pass through one great engagement more before he be two days older, I believe. I to the office, where busy all the afternoon, late, and then home, and, after some pleasant discourse to my wife, to bed. After I was in bed I had a letter from Sir W. Coventry that tells me that the fleete is sailed this morning; God send us good newes of them!
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commodorified | |
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This is a splendid editorial: I am endlessly grateful that my curiosity about history came on while my grandparents and great-uncle were still alive and telling stories, so that I listened properly, instead of nodding along dutifully as I hope I would have done regardless. And endlessly regretful that there was never enough time, especially in the case of my grandparents' last years, when looking after them tended to get in the way of - and suck up the energy for - listening to them. I never did hear the end of the one about the water tower at Dresden[1], or the joke about the duck hunter - Grandpa was going to tell me that one when I was old enough, and then he couldn't tell it properly - it was, I gather, one of those jokes you have to act out. (On Henry Allingham) But perhaps the best tribute was that people listened to him. The boy who once longed to enlist lived to say on the BBC: “War is stupid. Nobody wins.”... The good bit is when they go off-message, quirky and human. I have never forgotten the day that an old lady’s casual remark revealed to my innocent schoolgirl ears her dislike of Churchill — “Horrid bossy man, all boiler suits and bombast”. It does not detract from Churchill, but it is liberating to encounter the stroppy, messy diversity of real experience.... You think, for instance, that upper-class Edwardian girls were chaperoned innocents, their swains respectful? Well, a friend’s great-aunt Olive tells of a girl found one morning sewing up the traditional open front of her drawers. She blithely explained why: “I’m going out with Freddie in a punt.” Her virtue hung by those threads. ... It is instructive, though sad, to chat with a 100-year-old suffragette and have her casually remember turning down marriage with a man she adored because it would have ended her teaching career. “One couldn’t have both, dear. Not like girls now.” ... In an age where ex-prime ministers (well, the last one anyway) display a sense of pampered entitlement to luxury, cherish also the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire’s story of Alec Douglas-Home. Coming home from the Kennedy funeral, he offered to lie very still in his pyjamas in the Chatsworth guest bed and not rumple it, so they wouldn’t have to change the sheets for Princess Margaret the next night. ... And only conversations with elders can remind us of the fabulous but untried newness of things: in Canada, I once met a man whose father rode the first cross-continental train to get a job building a new place called — er — Vancouver.Tell me a family legend of yours? I'll start: My grandfather was on the railroad from 1916-1965. He had some difficulty with the pension people in '62 explaining that he wasn't actually retirement age, yet: the Canadian Army apparently knew a 6' 15 year old when they saw one by 1916 - thank God - but the Chesapeake and Ohio weren't quite so inclined to be fussy. Sometime around 1945, when he was an engineer, his freight train nearly derailed. His fireman at the time - who I met briefly when I was a kid - never got tired of telling the story of climbing frantically up the - as he remembered it - damn' near vertical floor of the engine, hollering "She's goin', Hiker, she's goin'!", and my grandfather hollering back, "Well, let the sonofabitch go, then - we don't own her!" I wish I had thought to ask how the Hell they got her back on the track ... but I guess that wasn't the point. [1] Yard limits? More like what you might call ... guidelines, apparently. ETA: and then via friendsfriends, I promptly find this: In the early forties, eight inmates of the Goree prison unit formed one of the first all-female country and western acts in the country, capturing the hearts of millions of radio listeners. Then they nearly all vanished forever..
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