Peggy Lee - Why don't you do right

The incomparable Miss Peggy Lee. Music so good it makes me weep

Delayed gratification

My house smells like a fruit-shop at the moment. Pears, nectarines, apples all sit around waiting to be eaten or transformed into jars of preserves. It's tedious work, cutting up windfalls and cooking them and bottling them, but it's all worth it in the depths of winter when I can open a jar and have gorgeous flavourful fruit for crumbles and pies and breakfast. Supermarket canned fruit is just blah compared to the real thing, and some of it, ridiculously, comes from China. I bought some pulped apples once (I was pushed for time and apples were out of season) and found out that all but one brand (Roxborough, I think) consisted of apples grown in New Zealand and Australia, shipped as pulp to China, canned there and shipped back again! Mad world.
   So tomorrow I take my vorpal sword in hand and turn on the music and work my way through the produce pile.

Acting

Been watching Downton Abbey tonight. Got to the part where Matthew returns from the war with a spinal injury that means that not only will he be paralysed, he won't be able to "be a proper husband" to his fiancee.  I wonder if actors get attached to the people they play. Do they feel annoyed or grieved when the scriptwriter decides to have something horrible happen to their character? Poor William has just died of lung failure, so I bet his actor was pissed off at being written out. That's the great thing about being a writer I guess, the God-like power to invent characters and have them suffer, die, love, give birth etc. Perhaps God is The Great Scriptwriter, just having a hell of a lot of fun playing about with us. I know this is not an original idea, Shakespeare had it way before me. Remember "Lost"? It was just like real life, a lot of dashing around the jungle for obscure reasons that turn out to be no reason at all, the whole thing was a load of rubbish - at the end they all "went into the light".What a swizz. If I'd paid money for that series, I'd want my money back. And left us with more questions than answers. I still don't know why the polar bear appeared. Why was it on the island? And what happened to all the other survivors of the plane crash that weren't Jack, Hurley, Kate, Sayeed, etc., the other nameless dudes on the beach who hung around out of focus in the background?  Was the series symbolic or metaphoric, or just an intriguing waste of time?
        And why am I still thinking about this?

Big time

Autumn approaches, with its treasure of fruit and vegetables. At the moment I have pears and nectarines, and a whopping great marrow. Usual story, you leave the garden alone for half an hour and the little zucchini turn into pods fit for bodysnatchers to hide in. The Washo tribe of California called the autumn Big time or Gumsaba, so I too think of autumn as Big time, it seems an appropriate name. (The Washo tribe were the first North American natives to be totally exterminated by the whites. There is a wonderful novel called "Rabbit boss" by Thomas Sanchez that details the demise of the tribe through several generations - I've been trying to get it for ages but it's out of print). Shakespeare called the season "the teeming autumn big with rich increase", and Keats described a "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness", so autumn has always been an inspiration.

      These tomatoes I bought at the market today are Oxheart tomatoes. I was not initially thinking of eating them, but painting them, they are so attractive. Part way through a coloured pencil drawing at the moment, but it's difficult to get real intensity of colour with pencil, for such flamboyant subjects as these. Once I've immortalized them in pencil and paint, I'm going to cook them down into passata. Yum.

Want to laugh?

Want a really good laugh? Go to a website called Happy place and look at Pics and posts, especially the smartass comments left on perfectly innocuous signs. Good to see that wit and imagination are not dead. You too can be chased by worms, (or snakes if you wear mittens) and have to fight off a drunken octopus.

Old books

I was lucky enough to find this old book on the second-hand bookbarrow at Little River railway station.
The title sounds like the worst kind of bodice-ripper, but it's a fascinating account of four women who travelled to the East and fell in love with it. I had read of Isabel Burton before and her obsessive love for her complex, difficult and remarkable husband, but the other three women, Jane Digby El-Mezrab, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery and Isabelle Eberhardt, no.
Aimee Dubucq de Rivery's story is the most riveting. A Creole girl from Martinique, she was Josephine Bonaparte's cousin and was brought up with her. Sent for some years to a convent in Nante for her education, she was kidnapped by Barbary Corsairs on her return home. Ironically, her beauty saved her virtue: the pirate captain realised that she was a special prize, and she was eventually sent as a gift to the Sultan of Constantinople by the King of Morocco. Entering the harem, never to be seen again by her family, she became the youngest wife of the Sultan, and mother of his heir, Mahmoud. Thus the Ottoman Empire became a little more open to the West, and a little less insular in its dealings with Europe.
And proof that fact is stranger and far more interesting than fiction.

The wilder shores of love - an old/new treasure