el_staplador

Being a collection of the pictures that I consider came out best.

( Read more... )

Incidentally, here's how my going-away outfit ended up:
( The pearls looked better IRL though )

Standing in the back garden, in the rain, barefoot, long skirt, long hair loose, looking for the rainbow... I fear I may have become a hippie.

We have rainbows in the house now, anyway, since a very dear friend of my parents' from Winchester days gave us a rainbow maker as a wedding present. It's a crystal turned by a solar-powered motor, the whole caboodle being attached to the window by a sucker, and when the sun shines, it turns, and when the sun shines on it the house is filled with rainbows. (Yes, I know they're not technically rainbows, but they have the same cheering effect without the dampness.)

We have been trying out a lot of the things people have given us, mainly the big kitchen appliances. We have learned that:

1. The slow cooker is an excellent thing for Evensong nights, because we no longer have to choose between eating at 5 (before choir practice) and eating at 9 (after Evensong, get home, collapse, cook...). We can now eat at 8, if we put the slow cooker on in the morning before we leave for church, or straight after we get back, depending on the recipe. Score!

2. The waffle recipe included in the waffle maker makes far too many for two, even when halved. However, they do reheat nicely in the toaster.

3. Why did I never think of making apple/honey/sultana toasted sandwiches before? They're gorgeous.

4. There is no separating countertony from his deep-fat fryer. I have made the best of it, and intend to look up my recipe for churros at the earliest opportunity. (I'm not really complaining, not when it means that there will be pierogi tonight. OM NOM NOM.)

5. We could make soup in the slow cooker, and bread in the bread maker, and host racing demon parties, and set up a tolerable replica of 2 Velwell Road in the heart of Surrey.

6. The new set of scales is vastly preferable to the old one a) because the dial is considerably more legible; b) because the pan isn't cracked and doesn't leave a trail of flour/sugar/spice behind it.

7. We need bigger cupboards, and don't even ask where the formal china is going to go once Messrs Lewis deliver it.

Thanks to the best man, I now have a thorny hazel staff to go with my battered hat. His'n'hers yomping sticks, who'd have thunk it? I think they're an excellent present, and I walked to big Sainsbury in the rain yesterday in order to break mine in. (All I wanted was a tin of tomatoes and a loaf of bread, which I could have got from little Sainsbury, but I felt like a walk, and it wasn't raining when I started.)

The photo CDs have arrived. Thank you, freddiefraggles!

Happy birthday to gauroth, and to bomberman61 for yesterday.

We went to an exhibition at the castle in Annecy (which now serves as more of an art gallery); it was extremely interesting and looked at how perceptions and portrayals of lakes have changed since the Middle Ages. It was called 'Avec Vue Sur Lac'. And that's pretty much what this is:

( Read more... )

It's recommended by Tim LaHaye, and published in the UK by Scripture Union. This is probably some kind of a warning. tree_and_leaf has warned me off the creator of Left Behind, and I have read many SU books over the years that have set my teeth on edge. However, a Christian book suggesting that sex is a good thing is, well, a good thing, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt.

( Read more... )

This is not a book that I would wish my wife or my servants to read. It is particularly not a book I would like my children to read surreptitiously and take for gospel. (Granted, I did that with Marie Stopes' Married Love, and have not turned into a eugenicist, but even at the time I read it I was able to recognise her dodgier theories as an unfortunate effect of existing in the twenties. It would be fatally easy for a child to think, 'Mum is a Christian; this book calls itself Christian; therefore Mum must think this book is right'.) I shall not even be giving it to a charity shop, because I don't want to be responsible for putting this copy back into circulation. If anyone wants it for purposes of mockery, let me know.

Being a collection of pictures of churches, and interesting things found in and around them, that we saw on honeymoon. Not as long as you might fear, since I feel extremely uncomfortable taking photos in church, unless I'm the only one there, or it has been deconsecrated. And a lot of interior shots will be done without flash, and therefore be rubbish, because I'm paranoid about destroying wall-paintings and what have you. That said, there's nothing to stop me taking pictures of the exterior...

( Read more... )

And this would be an appropriate post on which to wish tree_and_leaf a very happy birthday!

Mainly sparrows and waterfowl; mostly in Annecy or on the lake, although there is a Parisian sparrow in there. Not remotely dialup friendly; sorry.

( Read more... )

Being a collection of pictures of the best things we saw on honeymoon.

( Read more... )

Awesomeness I didn't manage to get a picture of: the meal on the Eurostar (talk about travelling in style!), the snake we saw swimming in a river we crossed on our cycle trip, the (electric) Montmartrobus. Also awesome and unpictured, but not part of the honeymoon: the Lady Penelope car that passed us this morning on the way back from church (not a Roller, but exactly the right shade of pink).

Still to come: birdspam, churchspam, landscapespam, artypretentiousspam. If you can't wait, or don't trust my editing skills, the whole lot are here

(Speaking of waffles, I'm going to try out the new waffle iron this evening. Wheee!)

This is the one where someone gives you five words and you expound upon them at length. gipsy_dreamer gave me the following:

Singing

I never used to think of myself as a singer, but singing has always been part of my life, ever since year 1. I suspect that I was the only person in the school who actually looked forward to hymn practice, and for whom the threat of being made to sing a solo was powerless to impress. I joined the church choir a year or so later, and have been in some choir or other ever since. I've never been all that confident, though, having always been around people who are obviously better than me, and it's only in the past year or so that I've been really comfortable in what I'd think of as a 'good' choir. I don't sing alone much, partly out of shyness, but more because I'm not having lessons and therefore don't really have anywhere to do it. (This may change now we have the piano, of course.) My role in choirs tends to fall into one of two camps: either I get a lot out of it, or I give a lot to it. In the first the standard is just above mine, enough to keep me concentrating but not so hard as to scare me. In the second I am a Very Useful Person to have around, because I can actually read and sing an alto line, or tenor at a pinch.

Singing never fails to cheer me up. I invariably come out of a service or practice happier than I went in.


( Read more... )


If you'd like some words, please leave me a comment to that effect.

In other news, I have a couple of Dreamwidth invite codes, if there's anyone left in the known universe who wants one and hasn't had one yet.

So, my poor plants, having been abandoned for ten days in a heatwave, have done pretty much what you'd expect. Most of the herbs made it (the exception being the pot basil in the conservatory, and possibly the chives, but I'm hoping they'll pull through); most of the flowers didn't. One sweet pea has survived, having been protected from the worst of the sun by the wisteria and the passion flower, and there is hope for another couple. The sunflowers have all had it, which is annoying, because one looked as if it was going to get quite big, but the calendulas in the big pot are blooming away like there's no tomorrow. The bay tree (wedding present) is fine; the olive tree (present from us to my father, which we'll be delivering to him at the end of the month) is also fine. It rained a little last night, so I'm hoping that the worst is over.

The number of other people's cameras purported to be at our flat has now risen to two. So far, we haven't found any, but I wouldn't say that all hope was lost, yet.

The keylight thing fell off my keys, terminally, in the great effort to recover the other set of front door keys with a twizzly thing through the letterbox, but it was an annoying thing and is not much missed. (What, you mean I didn't tell you about the great effort to recover the other set of front door keys with a twizzly thing through the letterbox? Ah. Well, we went away, taking my set of keys, and leaving countertony's set with Anne and Majk, who were to be the last ones out after the weekend. They would shut the doors (Yale lock) and drop the keys back through the letterbox, shutting the front door (also a Yale) behind them. Then, when we got back from honeymoon, we'd get in using my set of keys, and find the matching pair lying neatly on the doormat. Now, the door has two deadlocks also, which we rarely use, so rarely that we didn't know that each one needs a separate key to lock it, and therefore, also to unlock it. One of those keys is on my keyring. The other is on Tony's. And Anne and Majk, in an effort to be tidy, evidently locked everything they could find... So we borrowed a twizzly thing from the builders across the street, and, after much puffing and cursing, for it was very hot, we retrieved the keys and got in. Married life, eh?)

Other casualties included general order and method, as the sitting room was subsumed in a massive pile of wrapping paper and kitchen appliances, but we've more or less sorted that out now, and just need to send people wedding cake, and write one million thank-you letters. And make a scrapbook and find jobs and a new house and and and...

We're back! Wonderful wedding, awesome party, lovely honeymoon, and thrilling retrieval of house keys through the letterbox!

Longer, insanely detailed post(s) to follow, no doubt, once I've uploaded my three million photos.

Would post, but I have no brain. But I'm posting anyway. House is full of bridesmaids, and I'm ridiculously tired and have started on the gin. Day complicated by having to book youth hostel to attend someone else's wedding so as not to have to worry about it on honeymoon.

I'm currently attempting to compile SuperSchedule of Doom, so that on the day my little brother will be able to tell anybody who asks him what they're meant to be doing, and where they're meant to be. When I've finished that I shall make a macaroni cheese. Except it won't be macaroni; it'll be penne. Then I'll write a shopping list for lunch on Saturday. Then I'll have some more gin.

wellinghall and adaese: you shouldn't have!

If I don't get back to the computer before Saturday afternoon (entirely possible), see you all in two weeks!

Do I want to spend Thursday and Friday ripping tacky sequins off two pairs of shoes and replacing them with less tacky sequins, or beads? Probably not. Let's hope they look OK with the dresses.

I have nearly nearly nearly finished the second dress; I'm pausing in the process of adding beads to the shoulder seams to write this. I need to do up the hem that has undone itself, and perhaps, if I'm feeling extremely virtuous, I'll fix the lining and the dress together around the hem.

Is listening to Trial by Jury a bad omen? It is perhaps fortunate that altos are rarely paired in opera: it will force us to write our own plot. Thinking about it, altos are rarely paired with anyone, particularly not each other. The options tend to be as follows:

- in Handel, Gluck, etc, male alto, originally castrato, then breeches part, now countertenor. Hero, usually paired with soprano heroine. Rarely ends happily. Romeo is an alto in Bellini's Montechetti ed i Capuletti.

- in Mozart, Gounod, etc, contralto or mezzo sings the part of a boy, usually with hopeless crush on the soprano. An exception is Maritana, which is slashy as hell (if Lazarillo has a crush on anyone, it's Don Cesar), and I want to sing it. I'm not even sure if there's a recording.

- in Bizet and Saint-Saëns, contralto or mezzo is femme fatale, is paired with Pathetic Tenor Hero, and comes to a Bad End. (Countertenors should not attempt these roles. They sound silly. Even Andreas Scholl. Particularly Andreas Scholl. On the other hand, somebody should write a setting of La Belle Dame Sans Merci for countertenor, because that would be extremely effective.)

- in everything else, particularly G&S, contralto is old bat, and paired with bass, if anyone (or, in G&S, the Baritone who Can't Sing but is Funny). Mezzo will end up with Baritone Who Can Actually Sing, unless some soprano nabbed the part, which is more than likely.

Of course, our musical life is unlikely to get more romantic than sniggering at the anthems that are settings of bits of the Song of Solomon, but it's quite amusing to speculate. We might end up carving up The Messiah between us.

Need to go and play with my hair now. Woe.

Part 1: LJ/DW
Part 2: LJ/DW

Title: La génie de l'amour
Summary: Eugénie and Louise, from the beginning
Warnings: A little Italian; more German; meaning apparent from context.

( Sing with me )

( The songs )

Part 1 here (LJ) or here (DW).

Title: La génie de l'amour
Summary: Eugénie and Louise, from the beginning
Warnings: Some Italian, more or less translated in-text.

( It was, perhaps, the wrong song for Eugénie. )

...and in a distinctly snarky mood:

Siners, abhor the Fiend,
His other Gospel hear:
The God of Truth did not intend
The Thing his Words declare,
He offers Grace to All,
Which most cannot embrace
Mock'd with an ineffectual Call
And insufficient Grace.

( Read more... )

Life would be much more amusing if religious factions were made to settle their disputes in verse, though I fear that today it would mostly be along the lines of Jingle bells/ Ratman smells/ Rowan flew away...

A thinky post, prompted by tree_and_leaf's latest post, and the illustrated medical works I've been coming across in the course of my work, and re-shelving Spiritual Midwifery and remembering an account from that, and getting annoyed by a comment by someone I've never come across before on the LJ of someone whom I don't have friended...

The thing that worries me most about the abortion debate is the assumption that the commenter of the moment is in a position to pronounce on the morality of a woman's decision, despite knowing nothing of her, her circumstances, or her character. Let me cite two cases to show what I mean:

When I first read Spiritual Midwifery I was particularly struck by the story of a couple who brought an anencephalic baby to term, and fought tooth and nail to be allowed to feed and care for him until he died in his own time. (Anencephaly is a horrible condition in which the skull and most of the brain fails to develop; it is, of course, incompatible with survival.) They met wih considerable resistance from the hospital staff, who did not understand why the parents were wasting time, resources and effort on a baby that was bound to die within days, and referred to him as an 'anencephalic monster'. They persisted, however, and remained with the baby until he died naturally, and, from their account, considered that the relationship with the child, no matter how short-lived, no matter how damaged he was, more than worthwhile.

Since many of the stories in Spiritual Midwifery come from Tennessee in the seventies, I'm not sure whether or not abortion would have been an option for these parents, but either way they brought the child to term and beyond - and encountered considerable resistance from those who were unqualified to judge the validity of their actions.

It was this story that sprang to mind when I, poking around someone else's LJ searching for I know not what, came across a discussion of the case of the Irish teenager carrying a child with the same condition, who after a protracted court battle was finally allowed to come to the UK with an abortion. And quite right too. I doubt that at seventeen I, even with the inspiring stories of Ina May Gaskin to encourage me, would have been able to face the prospect of carrying an anencephalic child to term. (I saw a picture yesterday, in a medical textbook. It was a disturbing sight. I could not bring myself to force anyone to give birth to such an infant against their wishes.)

This was, indeed, the gist of the discussion; however, one comment got my back up. Referring to an Irish mother who had shared her experience, having gone through the same ordeal herself but taken the pregnancy to term, a commenter enquired a) what right she had to poke her nose in (fair enough) and b) how this person could possibly claim to have had a meaningful relationship with a child without a brain. I'm paraphrasing, but the implication was there. And at this point I thought, what right do you have? How can you comment on the relationship between two people you've never met?

So there you have it: two opposite ways of dealing with the same condition, neither of which I can find it in my heart to condemn. I can condemn the hospital staff in the first case, who were considerably less than helpful in the bonding and grieving process. I can condemn the health authority that sought to keep the teenager in Ireland, as if her body were theirs to put where they wanted. And I can condemn the commenter who denied the validity of the relationship between a mother and a baby.

It comes down to this: every woman who decides on an abortion, and every woman who decides against one, does so on her own conscience and considering her own circumstances. What right have I - what right has anyone - to suggest that the couple mentioned above were morbid to care for their child as long as he lived? To say that Miss D was somehow inhumane not to want to bring into the world a baby who had no hope of surviving in it?

What right have I to say that X is having an abortion because having a baby at this point doesn't fit in with her career plans? That Y sees it as contraception? That Z is carrying on with her pregnancy because she wants to sponge off the government? That A has been pressured into having an abortion by her family? That B has been pressured into keeping the baby by her priest? That C is keeping her baby because she thinks it will make her boyfriend stay with her?

I don't. Nor do you. Nor does anyone. We don't have the right because we have no idea as to whether or not this is, in fact, the case. A woman's body is a woman's body; a woman's choice is a woman's choice. You and I can speculate about it until the cows come home, but all it will do is make us nasty, suspicious people.

Title: La génie de l'amour, part 1 (yes, it's a title we've had before. That was the prologue. Or epilogue. Or something.)
Summary: Eugénie and Louise, from the beginning
Warnings: Erm, diverse languages, and singing.

( Paris was full of girls who fell in love with their music teachers )

Also yesterday, I tracked down a quotation for which I'd been searching for ages, which appealed to me greatly when I first found it:

'She has not learned that her body is her own and her soul is her Maker's.' - Alice Bunker Stockham

Which is exactly how I see it. My body = mine. But there is more to me than my body and, while I don't belong to anyone else, I am not entirely my own. Perhaps I should make an icon of it.

Started losing my voice yesterday afternoon. My spacial perception has been a bit off for the last few days, and got worse yesterday. Slight headache; general feeling of wobbliness. Went home, crashed out.

This morning I had a temperature of 38.5degC, a splitting headache, and an extreme reluctance to move. It's all passing off now - my voice is back to normal already - but I've taken the day off work, and am spending plenty of time in bed.

Yes, I know, I know, you all thought I'd forgotten this one. I have a feeling that I ought to be writing more, and have nothing that I particularly feel like writing about, and so a prompt from a silly meme is as good as a prompt from anything else.

D is for Dreams

The great psychiatrists (for certain values of 'great') used dreams as a jumping-off point for psychoanalysis. I find that my dreams are not nearly memorable enough to do anything of the sort. I suspect that I could render them more so if I were to get into the habit of writing them down every morning, but life's too short.

My memorable dreams fall into two categories: dreams where my teeth fall out, and dreams about the wedding. The first category is the revenge of my subconscious for an incident in my first year at university. Having been given a pack of cards intended to help with the interpretation of dreams, and coming across one that explained dreams about teeth, I made a snippy comment in my diary to the effect that I had never, but never, dreamed about teeth. Now, of course, it's one of my most frequently recurring dreams. My teeth fall out; I am devastated; I gradually come to terms with my loss and begin life afresh without teeth. At one point I was having it so often that, in the course of a dream I stopped myself, reminded myself that I frequently dreamed that my teeth were falling out, and mightn't this be another dream? In my dream I earnestly considered this, and decided that no, this was real life, and my teeth had indeed fallen out. I felt rather silly the next morning.

At the moment I'm also dreaming about weddings, and the disasters that might befall them. In the last one it got to 3.30 on the wedding day, and my underwear and shoes were still at my mother's house (where, in fact, they've never been), and nobody had sorted the food. When I woke up I reflected that this was, in fact, a perfectly reasonable dream, since it's just what one might expect to happen if I were to get married from either of my parents' houses.


E is for English Mainland

I have spent more of my life on the English mainland than off it. I was born on it, educated on it up to the age of fourteen, went off it on average once a year, for a period not longer than two weeks. I'm not sure that I can give the Outsider's Perspective on it. After all, I'm an Overner. In fact, now that I've moved back to the mainland, I'm probably not even that. A grockle. A towrist.

Old habits die hard, however, and I still think of it as the mainland. The mainland is, of course, everywhere in England that's not the Island. The Island is the Isle of Wight. There is only one. The Island has a capital letter. The mainland does not.

The mainland ranges from the south coast to Hadrian's Wall, and from Offa's Dyke to the east coast. I know the south coast and Offa's Dyke best. Parts of it are made of chalk; parts of it are made of granite. It has towns and cities and fields and forests and moors. It's a bit too big to generalise about, really.