Seasonal
To begin with, Cecilia has sent us a link to get us in the seasonal mood:
http://www.gap.com/browse/info.do?cid=43164&mlink=5058,959990&clink=959990
[I am not having a good time with my technology this evening. I can't get it to come up on 'We Three Kingz' which is what we're looking for here. When this window opens--and it will probably duff around for thirty seconds claiming 'error on page' but it should finally come up--you have to run your mouse over the upper left hand corner and there will be a teeny window with three guys holding handbells. That's the one you want. Well, some of the others may be okay too. This is the one I want you to want.]
Although I suppose it might depend on your definition of ‘seasonal’ and of ‘mood’. Works for me.* But I’m about to have to go drag the jungle indoors again, so I need to be in a seasonal mood. **
It’s suddenly been warm today. I came back panting from morning hellhound hurtle and ripped off a couple of thermal layers.*** Yesterday was still winter, which in Hampshire means raw and snappy, but it wasn’t biting you till you bleed–and then yesterday evening the thermometer started to plummet so I rushed everything indoors at about 7 pm when it was reading 34° . . . and when I put hellhounds out for the last time some unspecified number of hours later it was 40°, which was annoying. It was something like 45° when I got up this morning (and took the jungle back outdoors again, with attendant grumbling), and I think it broke 50° which is ridiculous in December. And now the frelling temperature is plunging again.
(I was going to post a photo of a geranium dressed for winter, but I’ve waited five minutes for the frelling ‘add media’ window to open, and I’m bored.)
* * *
* Thanks to the ravages of ME I missed too many practises and had to drop out of the handbell carol band. Feh. Showtime at the old folks’ home was last night, and I asked Niall how it went. He said that they were a big hit with the Alzheimer’s crowd, who were clapping and singing along, but that the people who were still living in what is generally considered the real world were snippy and critical. I am tempted to say something bleak about the relationship between all artists and all audiences, but I had much better not. . . .
Well. Amy sent this link:
http://www.cracked.com/article_16878_if-twilight-was-10-time-shorter-100-times-more-honest.html
. . . and I’d already asked her if she wanted to be identified because I wanted to post the link, when it belatedly occurred to me that I’m out of my Pollyanna brief again. Sigh. But how many multi-gazillion-selling vampire novels are there out there that feature wet useless heroines who by their example will encourage their readers to find boyfriends (preferably all-powerful boyfriends who will love them forever) to be wet and useless with? And which are turned into multi-gazillion-ticket selling films. I just so don’t want to fight this battle again–I’m old and tired, and if this really were the ‘post-feminist’ era–and how I hate that phrase–we wouldn’t need to fight it again. And, because it’s vampires, this one is in my face. I’ve had something like half a dozen emails this week linking TWILIGHT with SUNSHINE one way or another–none of the ways appeal to me in the slightest, including the likelihood that TWILIGHT is helping SUNSHINE’s sales: of course I want to sell wildly and ferociously and astoundingly–I’m with Dorothy Parker on the subject of being a millionaire: I’m sure I’d be just darling at it–and so anything that brings this fantasy 70p or so nearer the attic floor of Third House is good news. Or ought to be. But TWILIGHT and the TWILIGHT phenomenon depress the hell out of me, and the idea that people are coming to SUNSHINE from TWILIGHT and love them both because they’re both, you know, vampire novels, and that there’s no significant or noteworthy difference between Sunshine and Bella–which according to some of my fan mail, there isn’t–makes me want to pull a late career change and become a full-time homeopath or an oceanographer or a coat check hag.^
So read the link and have a laugh, and I’ll go have a cold bath^^ and calm down.
^ If I were thirteen and musical, I’d learn to play the organ.
^^ In this weather? I will not
** Maybe I’ll sing. Something like the fourth verse of We Three Kings, which has always struck me as rather remarkable as a Christmas carol: Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume/ Breathes a life of gathering gloom/ Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying/ Sealed in the stone-cold tomb. Didn’t this catch some of you a bit sideways when you were a fourth or fifth grader and in the school choir? Yeep.
*** And then forgot to put them on again and froze to death when I went round to Niall’s to ring handbells–change methods, not carols: there are only three of us^ who ring methods on handbells around here so we need all of us–if I didn’t know better I’d think Niall and Penelope^^ are from Maine. I should bring hellhounds for a heat source. Might as well put all that dog food^^^ to some use.
^ Niall, Duncan, and me
^^ Penelope is out on Thursday nights to ensure she has nothing to do with method ringing on handbells. Niall says he was maybe a little over-insistent about handbells when he was younger.
^^^ hollow laughter
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