Ganeida's Knots

My best friend is the man who'll get me a book I haven't read. ~Abraham Lincon.

It has rained every day of the first week of the holidays ~ a slow mizzling rain that leaks incontinently from the overburdened sky.  It does not make me want to go out & play.  Unfortunately it does not make me want to get stuck into the myriad of household chores that are just waiting to fill my spare moments either.

Tomorrow I drive Star out to the farm so she can spend some of her holiday time with her sister.  I am so grateful Sile is ok about this & is happy to have both my girls so they can spend some time together.  They miss each other but circumstances being what they are Liddy needs to be where she is.  They are shearing again on Monday so that will have Star grateful she's taking up music rather than animal husbandry!  And I've told Sile the girl is a good cook so make use of her!

At some point I really want to get to my mother's but Liddy's timing has rather put a spanner in the works so we will see.  It may have to be the week after.  As we have spent so much of this year behind the eightball, what's another term?!  Dearest gets antsy when I make going away noises because he knows the cats will have a serious meltdown & although they are both happy to have him in their orbit neither will let him do the necessary grooming ~ & it is tick season so groomed they must be.  Kirby, who is the more neurotic of the two, can be very difficult to manage though he is generally a sweetie for me.  However I know that is not the case for anyone else!

Plus I want to go though the pattern books at Lincraft & see if they have any pattens for salwar kameeze so I can make my own in the sort of colours & patterns I like, in the sort of plain dress that I am comfortable with.  I have been looking on~line for ages but I don't generally like the Indian patterns & would so much rather make something in the sort of small floral print cottons many Mennonite ladies wear, at least for the tops, with plainer trousers.  And it will be so much cheaper as well!  Besides it's one of those lovely vicarious experiences where you can gaze longingly at beautiful fabrics in designs you wouldn't be caught dead in in real life ~ well, I wouldn't.  Seriously, I adore looking at all the cutesy little buttons in their long clear tubes & the cards of pretty ribbon & lace edgings, the skeins of soft wool & silk threads for cross stitching.  Never use any of it but I like looking.  Am hoping to do that when I take Star to see Tomorrow When the War Began, which she read for English last term even though I don't like John Marsden.  His writing annoys me but most of mine have enjoyed his books & he is a very strong writer.  Unfortunately his main protagonist is a girl & she always sounds like a bloke in drag to me so  the books don't work for me.  The trailer looks good though so I have hopes the movie will be ok & Dino, who has already seen it, reckons it's all good.

However I had a score at the library ~ which had Star rolling her eyes in horror! I picked up Frances Osborne's The Bolter. Now for the uninitiated I first came across this choice epitaph when I read Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate ~ a hysterical & tragic commentary on upper class shallowness.  Mitford's character may have been, in part, based on Frances Osborne's great~grandmother ~ the bolter of the title, who scandalised Edwardian society, was at the heart of Kenya's White Mischief, married 5 times & had so many lover's she lost count. 

Not the most uplifting of reading I grant you but anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with this family knows 2 things: they write very, very, very well & they are very, very funny. Seriously, Mitford describing the *child hunt* wherein the children were given an hour's start before the hounds were set after them as they bolted for home across England's sporting grounds with their father chasing after them on his horse can have me laughing till I weep.  Only in England. So I was already half intrigued.  The Mitfords, the Sackville~Wests, all mad as hatters, outrageous, scandalous.  I forget which one of the Mitfords turned Commie [when it wasn't the done thing] & fell madly in love with Hitler ~ sorry, but I find that terribly, terribly funny, mostly, I think, because I don't believe for a moment they even believed themselves.  It was all an act & entertainingly funny but with terribly tragic consequences: suicide, depression, adultery, homosexuality.  The sad list goes on & on.  Terribly clever, terribly witty & totally amoral. How not to live a life.  I will enjoy the writing if the content rather less so, especially as ~ did I mention the rain?