Blog Fail

I know I should write, I know I want to, but I have been smitten with a combination of laziness and fear. There are ideas ready to go onto the page, but everytime I start to write the "delete" button begins its siren call, I don't know where this has come from, or why, is this writers block ? How do you get writers block if you aren't a writer ? A complete lack of faith in myself has reappeared.

Bear with me, like Arnie, I will be back.

And for your information my keyboard is not mightier than his gun.

A certain irony

My profile picture is "Marianna" a painting by J E Millais illustrating one of Tennyson's poems. All very romantic and thought provoking, the poor, abandoned woman, deserted by her fickle lover, look at all that lovely iconography waiting to be teased out

I always thought of it as "the woman with the bad back."

The picture on my title banner is a pair of shoes I bought some years ago from a dangerously addictive website http://www.italianheels.com/index_en.shtml . Not all of them are hooker shoes, but I would imagine a good few of them could be blamed for appointments with a chiropractor.

I like the connection, albeit subliminal.

Apres moi le deluge

After a wonderful sunny week when I have sat in the garden tweeting and trying to turn my legs from milk white to Jersey cream, suddenly even the sunshade has had to multi-task. Monsoon conditions meant Harrogate was twinned with Hyderabad.

It is Wimbledon, what did I expect ?

Seventh Week, The Sub-Continent

The recent weather with its combination of high temperature, bright sun and then torrential rain has made me think of India, or rather how I believe India to be. My impressions were formed over the years by books, films and the abiding love Britain has for the sub-continent, even if it had made the country its victim.

The integration of Indian culture in Britain has been going on since the 1840's. Jane Austen writing of the thrill of a Kashmir shawl or new muslins, curries in all their permutations, kedgeree, mulligatawny soup. IPA, gin and tonic. Yoga, the Beatles and the Maharishi, the vibrancy of Belgrave Road in Leicester or shopping at "The Bombay Stores" in Bradford. We are lucky to have a connection with this beautiful country.

What surprised me was what a range of books I had, from the teenage romance (Who didn't love "Far Pavilions" ?) through to the wistful art of Rohinton Mistry. The wild and definitely non pc romps of "Flashman" and the clear observation of William Dalrymple. This huge and diverse country has inspired so many authors, and each creates a different view.

Others who fell under the spell include E M Forster, Colin Thurbron, Greg Roberts and Rudyard Kipling, while their own culture gave us the Mahabarata, the Kama Sutra, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Aravind Adiga and Tagore the Nobel prize winning poet. It is a rich and exciting heritage. Do not ignore it.

Mark Twain sums it up far better than I ever could

The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendour and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions, the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see.

Full Volume

We live in a three storey Victorian house with the humans using the first two floors and the young colonising the top, so for ease of communication we bought one of those phone systems that can also be used for internal calls. Five handsets, all over the place, but two clearly defined for BC and GC.

BC has lost his handset, we know it has to be in there somewhere. Under the heaps of "War Hammer", clothing, bedding, books and uni notes there is a phone. Trouble is, it is no longer charged ("not sure where the stand is") so we can't take the easy way out, hard work is going to be involved. Then, last night, to add insult to injury BC wandered through and in the most casual of tones enquired if we had seen his mobile which, in moments of duress, has been used as a substitute.

Now I do appreciate, in the scheme of things, this isn't really a problem. We have stairs and voices, communication is not impossible, but, inevitably voices will be raised to do this, shoutiness will be employed. Messages will be ignored, accusations will trickle back and forth.

Situation normal