Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Big day
Went onto the pavement outside the front of our house for the first time this morning, managing one house to the right and one house to the left before deciding that it was much safer in our back garden. Where I went so far as to do some very light gardening. To wit, picking up 19 dead leaves from the new daffodil bed with the litter picker. The only catch with this last being that the trigger is sometimes very hard to pull; the mechanism must catch with the leverage against one somehow. I am also pleased to report that the celandines are doing very well and we also have our first dandelion. Not a particularly impressive specimen but a dandelion flower nonetheless.
Inside, a correspondingly light diet on the reading front. Mornings when I am fresh I am doing 'The Eustace Diamonds' on the Kindle and afternoons, when I am only good for light fodder, I am doing 'Diary of a Nobody'.
It is some years since my last and first reading of the Trollope (see April 11th 2008) and I do not yet recognise the theme of telling the truth not always being for the best mentioned in that post, but hopefully I will get there. In the meantime I have been wondering about the sex ratio of his readership, then and now. Plenty of love interest for the ladies but there is also plenty of other stuff for the gents. For example, the legal niceties surrounding what exactly a widow might lift from her late husband's estate in the absence of proper testamentary provision. What is an heirloom, and as such be inalienable? Can a fancy necklace be such a thing? The book also contains a young lady with neither money, fancy looks nor fancy social graces, but who does have more homely virtues and who does catch her man. It strikes me that the Trollope oeuvre contains a number of such. And then there is Mary Garth from Middlemarch. Perhaps charecters of this sort appealed to the more humble or homely among the readership of such stuff.
And then I was pleased to find that we share something with the Nobody household. Which is that we also keep our front door locked and bolted and only use the back door for day to day purposes. Something which the various delivery people never seem to grasp. I suppose no one of them calls often enough for even this basic fact to sink in. Nor the window cleaner, who is regular enough that you might think that he would notice.
# posted by Jim @ 4:11 AM 
