Other Stories

Haworth

Haworth was amazing. Truly, it was Bronte-tastic. The museum was full of incredible things: the tiny books the children would write for their tin soldiers; first editions of the novels; letters; Emily's dress; embroidery not just by Emily and Anne, but also by Maria Bronte, who died as a child; Branwell's paintings; Patrick Bronte's Book of Psalms and magnifying glass; the sofa on which Emily died; locks of the sisters' hair from mourning envelopes.

I had intended writing a long and effusive post about how incredible it was to be so close to these real belongings of the authors I idolize, but as pretentious as this sounds, I honestly can't find the words. This hampers a blog post somewhat, so instead I shall share with you a few of the photos I took on the day.



The Bronte Parsonage (above)


Gate between Parsonage and Church (above)



The Dining Room where the girls did most of their work (above)

Haworth the village was also beautiful - hugely hilly as one would expect from the Yorkshire moors, and quite windy which added to the general sense of Wuthering-ness. It was *glorious*. I have more photos on Flickr.

::: P A U S E :::

This morning I am off up to Yorkshire for a couple of days. At some point this afternoon, I will be in the Bronte Museum at Howarth getting all overexcited and spending too much money in the giftshop. Expect photos.

In the meantime, though, I am elsewhere in blogland. The Reader Online asked me to chose a favourite poem for their Monday featured poem slot, and my choice is up today. Go see.

Catch Up

A long weekend spent in London town. Fairly glorious stuff.

Walked for miles and miles and miles. Traced the outline of the original Roman London Wall. Meandered up and down the South Bank, occasionally stopping for food and beer. Pounded the streets of Soho. Drank more beer, ate Italian food on Frith Street. Ordered room service and put the silver domes covering the food on our heads. This amused us, though perhaps you just had to be there.

I read lots and lots! Only just over 100 pages of Darkmans to go! Just past the bit with the cat and the light fitting. It made me sad.

Am now flitting about the house like a proverbial blue arsed fly for Boyfriend's mother and stepfather are currently in transit between the Motherland and here, coming to stay for three days. Boyfriend is bemused by my insistence on ironing and cleaning and manically tidying. I am determined that everything will be tidy and pristine and glorious when they arrive in (checks watch) about 5 hours time. He seems to have finally come round to my way of thinking, or is at least humouring me, for as I take this blog-break, I hear the hoover whirring and sucking downstairs.

Zadie, one of my two heavenly mogs, has worked out how to get onto the neighbour's roof, but not how to get down. She can only get back in if I open the french doors in the spare room upstairs.

And that is all. I am back to work on Thursday, and am already dreading how many emails I have lying in wait. I am resisting temptation to open my work email at home because I don't want to be depressed for the remaining day and a half of my holidays.

Friday Random Round-Up

I am tired and not a little hungover, so forgive the bullet points.

• My mum's hangbag was stolen yesterday afternoon, from her house, while she was in the garden. My mum is in her late 60s and quite visibly frail. Who DOES that? I am furious.
• I am half way through Dr Haggard's Disease, and it is so lining itself up as one of my Books Of The Year.
• I am getting the train up to lovely Glasgow in an hour and a half. The up side is that I have several hours of unadulterated reading to look forward to. The down side is 40 minutes sitting at Carlisle station.
• My dad is apparently moving to Oslo now. Which is good, because I've never been, and I'd really like to. Unfortunately it's about £8 for a beer, but hey ho.
• My head hurts. Damn cider. Felt like a good idea at the time.

That is all. See you next week!

Books, Planes, and Water

I return after a week's bloglessness. The reason for my silence is that my mother, unfortunately, has been taken quite ill, and since none of us four kids live anywhere near her, there was all manner of remote coordination. But, she is now resting up at my brother's house in Liverpool, and is hopefully on the mend.

I have also been away - my brief weekend stint with my dad in Geneva. Travelling both ways was beyond hellish. I was departing from Gatwick on Friday night with a certain famous budget airline (when will I learn?) and my flight time was 8.15pm. I arrive dead on 6.15pm, just as my check-in desk opened. All well and good, until the entire bank of desks' conveyor belts broke down. Twice. Took me 45 minutes to check-in. So, off I trot to locate the end of the security queue... the queue was over an hour long. It meandered depressingly around the South Terminal and ended up right next to Arrivals. Urgh. But wait I did, and made it through the X-ray machines 20 mins before my flight was due to depart.

Of course, it ended up being delayed.  Of course it did. Eventually I arrived in Geneva, an hour and a half late, and extremely hungry (I had forgotten breakfast, had choir rehearsal through lunch, and didn't have time to get anything at the airport - and 'due to a technical problem' there was no food on the plane.) Thank God for dad thinking ahead, and we ended up having a very pleasant meal of smoked salmon and toast at 1am.

Coming back yesterday, though, was worse. On top of the vague panic I was feeling after getting several texts from friends telling me that Oxford looked to be at least partly under water (I live a street away from a canal, and not much further from the Thames/Isis), I then had the great displeasure of discovering my flight to Heathrow (flying back to a different airport than I left from always confuses me) was and hour and a half late. We eventually boarded, but missed our air traffic control slot so left two hours late. Landed at Heathrow to discover that 11 of the 37 aircraft stands were closed due to concrete problems. We had to sit on the sodding tarmac for nearly 45 minutes until we got a slot. Don't get me started on the scrum that was passport control.

I eventually stumbled back into my (thankfully above water) house rather later than I had intended. My mobile had run out of battery, so when I managed to get it plugged in I was deluged with texts from Boyfriend in increasing states of worry about my silence and lack of being at home. and from Dad, who hadn't heard from me to say that I'd landed safely. Ah, how the men in my life worry so. :)

Ultimately, I am mighty glad to be home. The flooding is worrying though, with 1,500 people in Oxford already being evacuated, and the Thames looking set to burst its banks. One of the main roads in and out of the city is already flooded - I am listening avidly to BBC Radio Oxford for updates. I can't imagine how awful it must be for the people in Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, who have been badly affected.

Managed to finish Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad while in Geneva, and yes, I have bought the dreaded Potter. My thoughts on those to follow.

Le Ramble

Of course, when I said in an earlier post that I couldn't think of any book set in Switzerland, I was completely forgetting about Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, which won the Booker Prize in - I think - 1985 (though do correct me if I'm wrong). It languishes somewhere in Kirsty Towers, so am planning to dig it out, and take it with me to Geneva in a couple of weeks time.

I am popping over merely for a weekend to see dad, and will be staying in his other half's flat not far from Geneva. It's a very tiny village called Mont-sur-Rolle, and it looks over Lake Geneva. Last time I was there we took a little ferry over the lake to France, and it was delightful.

I like France. My sister lived there for years, and some of my earliest memories are going over there with mum to stay in their cottage in the middle of nowhere. She and her husband were lock keepers. We used to eat baguettes in the garden, and my sister used to buy me Orangina and strain out the little bits of peel. She used to teach me little sentences in French to say to the people that wandered by and inevitably stopped to say hello. Normally things like "I am Scottish" and "I like chocolate" and "My name is Kirsty". Nothing hugely sophisticated - I was only 4 after all.

It was because of that I chose to do French at school, rather than German. I ended up doing CSYS (or whatever they're called now. Advanced Higher?) though I don't remember a huge amount about it, other than writing essays on unemployment in France, and reading Therese Desqueyroux by Francois Mauriac.

I ramble. But all I'm saying is that it'll be nice to have a chance to practise my French again. Last time I was in Switzerland I was pleasantly surprised by how much came back to me. Between that and singing in German, I'm getting to be quite the linguist!

Maybe not...

Trains

There are few places more condusive to a good read than a train. And twice as good as a train journey is two train journeys within 5 days, in my case from Oxford to Glasgow and then back. The trip up on Thursday gave me the chance to (finally!) finish Marge Piercy's really-rather-good Woman on the Edge of Time, and get a good 50 pages into Mansfield Park. I love Austen's prose, this is the only one of her novels I haven't yet read, and I was still basking in the glow of seeing Becoming Jane  on Wednesday night. However, I had a pretty manic weekend in Glasgow - trying to see as many friends and family members and boyfriend's family members as possible between Friday and Sunday was a Herculean task as well as consuming my body weight in Tennent's Lager (ah, the glorious Tennent's Golden Wine, how I miss you when I'm in England). It left me approximately no time to sit down and read. The one chance I did get to open the book ended moments later when I promptly fell asleep on boyfriend's sofa.

So, clambering onto the train heading away from my hometown, leaving boyfriend and friends and mum behind me, the one thing I could console myself with was that I had 5 and a half hours of virtually uninterrupted reading time ahead of me. Except I just couldn't concentrate on dear old Austen. It wasn't her, it was me. My mind just couldn't make the jump back a couple of centuries... so, reluctantly, I've put it down for another day. Instead I pulled out David Mitchell's Number9dream, and got immediately sucked into Eiki Miyake's Tokyo reality/fantasy world. Am now about half way through, and I'm very much looking forward to get back to it this evening.