An ABC meme

From the Queen, and also from Zoesmom. I’m not tagging anyone but play along if you want to. It’s always good to have a meme in reserve for those days when you are lacking in inspiration.

A – An advantage you have – being educated, and in the US, being English, and in business, not feeling the need to please everyone so that I don’t have a problem saying ‘No’.

B – Blue or brown eyes – Blue/green/grey, or so I hear. They look blue to me.

C – Chore you hate – Cleaning my bathroom. It’s really not that big a deal and not that time consuming since my bathroom is tiny, but it’s the one I really resent.

D – Dad’s name – Who?

E – Essential start of your day – washing my face at the very least.

F – Favourite colour – don’t have one, but generally I like rich tones.

G – Greatest thing you’ve ever done that made you feel really good – Completing the Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk; and finishing my MA.

H – Habit you have – gesturing with my hands a lot. Not sure if it’s a habit, I think it’s genetic.

I – Issue you hate that the world tries to make you pursue – Anything to do with ‘celebrities’.

J – Job title – Senior Online Product Development Manager. Yes, it is just a jumble of words that when taken together mean precisely nothing.

K – Kohls or Target – Target. I find Kohls depressing.

L – Living arrangements – apartment in old farmhouse in Easton, with my husband

M – Music you like – guitar based stuff with good lyrics; male angst music (Blue Nile, Ryan Adams et al); 80s British pop; country; cock rock (because I think it’s hilarious); classic crooners

Nicknames – Beck, Becks, Bex, B, Becky-Betsy, Miss C, La Cullena, Mrs H, Rbecca (ar-becca) are current. Past nicknames have included Beck-Becks, Liz and Nige.

O – Overnight hospital stay – 2 weeks when I was 12 or 13 and had a birthmark removed.

P – Pet Peeve – the use of ‘which’ instead of ‘who’ in written and spoken American English. Judging on ubiquity it seems to be accepted usage, but it never fails to make me mentally reach for the red pen.

Q – Quote that you like most – ‘History: it’s just one fucking thing after another’

R – Right or left handed – very right handed

S – Siblings – one sister, a step-sister, a step-brother

T – Time you wake up – I get up at 5.30am. I wake up around 9am.

U – Underwear – I aim for nothing that is going to show through my clothing, and never a VPL.

V – Vegetable you dislike – Peas. Nasty little blighters.

W – What makes you run late – trying to decide what to wear

X – X-rays you’ve had – for my back, once, when I trapped a nerve

Y – Yummy food you make – Pineapple upside down cake

Z – Zoo animal – I don’t think I have ever been to a zoo, certainly not that I remember. Unless it’s one with a strong captive breeding programme for endangered species that aims to re-establish them in the wild, I’m not remotely interested.

TBR

This is my current TBR shelf, nicely restocked after a visit to the local library sale a couple of weeks ago. That’s not a bad stack for me, since until this year’s decision to buy all the books I wanted, I rarely had unread books kicking around. I used to buy at the same rate I consumed, and did an awful lot of re-reading to absorb the spare time. This lot will have to wait until I finish Austerity Britain 1945-51, which I started on the train this morning and which I’m finding utterly absorbing. Not including The Faerie Queene, they should be enough to keep me going for 6-8 weeks.

• The Guermantes Way – Marcel Proust. To continue my gradual progress through Proust. I defer reading him and then really enjoy the books once I get started.
• Literature from the Axis of Evil – Writing from Iran, Iraq, North Korean and other Enemy Nations (from Emily, and I have read some of this but not enough to count it as ‘read’)
• Green Mansions – W H Hudson
• Hard Boiled Sentimentality – Leonard Cassuto. Background reading for bookclub.
• The Village – Marghanita Laski. Newly arrived from Persephone today. There should be another couple in the post, too.
• The Balkan Trilogy – Olivia Manning
• Mountolive – Lawrence Durrell
• Aspects of the Novel – E M Forster
• Howards End - E M Forster
• The Documents in the Case – Dorothy L Sayers
• Frenchman’s Creek – Daphne du Maurier. Listened to this not so long ago, so not quite ready for the print version yet. Might save this for another rainy afternoon, with tea and Jaffa Cakes.
• The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser. I made a truly pathetic start on this but I will read it eventually.
• Bloodchild – Tim Bowler. Snaffled from the proof copy shelf at work.
• Three by Tey – Josephine Tey. Technically, I’ve read all these before, but not this volume. So it stays here.
• Tom’s Midnight Garden – Philippa Pearce. I’ve read this too, but I’ll read it again before re-shelving it.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy. Listened to this earlier in the year as well, and didn’t enjoy it very much. But for 50c in a library sale, my 15-year-old heart couldn’t resist it.
• The Complete Short Stories of W Somerset Maugham – a handsome, 2 vol, cased hb set. For $2! I think I have all these in pb but this set was irresistible.

Oh, there’s more, on the shelf that didn’t get into the photo:

• The Lay of the Land – Richard Ford
• The Decline and Fall of the British Empire – Piers Brandon. I think I really will get to this, in a few months. It will round out We Danced All Night and Austerity Britain quite nicely.
• The Greeks – H D F Kitto. I do like Kitto. So very no-nonsense.
• Balthazar – Lawrence Durrell. There must be a third one of these kicking around somewhere, I know I’ve only stomached read the first.
• The Essays: A Selection – Michel de Montaigne. I’ve dipped into these, but again not enough to class it as ‘read’.
• Green Dolphin Street – Elizabeth Goudge
• Pensees and The Provincial Letters – Blaise Pascal. What was I thinking?
• The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
• Quo Vadis – Henryk Sienkiewicz
• Gentian Hill – Elizabeth Goudge

Tom Jones still sounds Welsh

Good old Tom! Played at a local outdoor pavilion last night, and I went with a couple of British friends. I think about half the crowd might have been British, actually. Certainly the woman next to us, plus the entire row behind. We’d anticipated sitting there huddled under golfing umbrellas, but the weather played fair and threw us a beautiful evening.

The evening started off in such a way that we wouldn’t have been surprised if it had gone wrong. I picked up one friend, and we drove down to Westport. Just as we swung into the parking lot, she screamed ‘I forgot the tickets!’ So, we drove out of the carpark and back to her house, convinced that by the time we got back to the pavilion there would be nowhere to park and all the good seats would be gone. Now that we had seen the pavilion car park, we didn’t even bother trying to park there on our return, some 45 minutes later.

Meanwhile, the third leg of this wobbly tripod was lurking around waiting for us, getting into the entrance line, getting out again, getting back in line. Womanfully, she survived standing in heels for an hour or more, and did not drink the wine she’d brought for us to share. Eventually we were reunited, found good seats, and got the corkscrew out.

I saw Tom Jones play the last night at Glastonbury in, I think, 1991, but at that stage he was some bloke your mother liked, and after three days of camping out we were more interested in getting home and showering. So before last night, I couldn’t have been classed as a Tom Jones fan. I looked him up online when I got home and found out he’s 69, so officially before my time. Although also during it, and on the evidence of last night’s show, I begin to suspect he’ll outlive me. Everyone knows ‘Delilah’, of course, I think if you were born after the time it was a hit it gets pre-loaded into your brain at birth. I do remember ‘Reloaded’ and I like his duet of ‘It’s cold outside’ with Cerys Matthews, but other than that most of the Jones oeuvre was unknown to me.

Well, the show was shed loads of fun, and most endearingly, Tom Jones still sounds Welsh, with a Jones- the-steam-from-Ivor-the-Engine accent:

He was a good, old style entertainer. No light show, no ‘Tom Jones experience’. Instead he was quick and funny, sang lots of songs, played up to his sexy image without for a minute taking himself too seriously and was clearly thoroughly enjoying every minute. Various items of underwear were hitting the stage, I definitely saw a couple of bras fly through the air, and a large Welsh flag was waved prominently right in front of him. You could tick off all the cliches, but the enthusiasm from where I ended up standing, right at the front, in the flag-waving, knicker-throwing, dancing crowd, was entirely genuine.