The holiday season is half over, and all has gone well so far. Christmas Day lunch was fine, although at the last minute Mr A proposed that he would construct a pigeon breast starter (with salad leaves to placate me and my weird fixation on vegetable matter). Maybe he decided that there just wasn't enough meat. I really think that if he were allowed, Mr A would subsist on nothing but meat, salty snacks and wine gums. Anyway, against my better judgement, I let him, but I should have made him do it on Boxing Day because he just got in the way when I was trying to coordinate the main course. It was very nice, anyway.
We were very sparing with presents. I ordered a couple of books from Amazon for Mr A. One is about the history of MI5, written by the lecturer at Bletchley Park who spoke so well, and the other is the Booker winner this year, Wolf Hall, a novel about Thomas Cromwell. What you can't tell from Amazon is the size of the books, and while I knew they were both hardbacks, they turned out to be huge: each of them about two inches thick. Very impressive in terms of quantity, and the MI5 one has got the quality thumbs up already.
Mr A gave me three DVD sets, which is a bit of a swiz given that I now have to share them with him. We've already watched quite a lot of Fry and Laurie's Jeeves and Wooster ITV series, which is tremendous. We've been very surprised that Hugh Laurie is so good - I think he's busy in America most of the time nowadays, so we don't see him as much as Stephen Fry, who's on the box every two minutes here. The other two are The Wire and the first series of The Thick Of It. Plenty of economical sofa-based entertainment to look forward to over the coming year.
We've been rather unlucky with the weather, though. Some might be pleased that in the current period of unusually arctic temperatures we have been spared the travel chaos that ensues from heavy snow. We, however, are not planning to travel anywhere, and would have loved to take the toboggan out for a spin, but we have had nothing but a light dusting of snow which has long since disappeared. A neighbour, however, was determined that a white Christmas would need to be arranged, and procured a snow machine (it was more like foam, actually). Their house is in the picture at the top of this post. Very festive.
[The revision is going quite well, although at this stage I am always very nervous and unsure whether there is enough time/concerned that I am blogging when I should be revising/keeping emergency chocolate in my desk drawer/being reminded again of how unpleasant revision is. One factor that has improved the experience was finding an old cartridge pen, and cartridges containing purple ink. Lovely!]
5 comments:
Have you not seen Hugh Laurie in HOUSE yet? Oh, you must. He is AMAZING in it!!
We don't have tv - or I should clarify that with - we don't have cable and we don't have satellite. We can get CBC in very blurry snowiness so if you want to watch that you can. I don't and prefer to read anyway.
As for snow. We have so much that the trees are groaning with the weight. It does look lovely if you are inside looking out at -21C.
Still - that's most of the year here it seems. So nothing new.
Happy Holidays to you Lola. And happy revisioning too.
I've just put House on our DVD rental list (but it might be quite some time before it reaches the top)!
Happy New Year!
I reccomend Wolf Hall, a 'big' book, and not just in weight, it's a brilliant read. I also second House as a must see. Laurie is nothing like his comedy persona, he is a revelation as a 'serious' actor. I must be one of the few Guardian readers who missed out on The Wire (the paper promoted it every day it seemed) and it's one I may get around to later this year.
Good luck with the revision, purple ink must help & Happy New Year.
Have a happy new year (revision can wait!).
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