My favourite day of the year. We pay for May annually with
the horrors of November, and every year we are rewarded with this whole extra
un-paid-for day. Today was heartbreakingly beautiful around here, and that was
nice too. Helen and her husband David (still isolated from his job in
Thessaloniki) came and walked me twice around the gardens – and brought me two
freshly-pulled beetroots, golf-ball-sized, from their garden. They constitute
the entire crop, if I understood aright.
I shall soon dine on them, greens and all.
Here should be a picture of the EPS, but Blogger's photo-upload, usually so simple and efficient, won't behave. Let's hope for better tomorrow.
I measured it today – 10 ½”. I was hoping for a wee bit
more. (The target is 14-15”.) I did quite a bit of knitting, both during the
Andrew Marr show and at our virtual post-Mass coffee. Today is Pentecost, a
fave. I was sorry to miss it.
Comments
What’s this about gooseberries? I’d better google. I have a
couple of bushes in Kirkmichael, and would hate to think they pose a danger to
any of our trees. Let alone to me. They should be ready soon.
I agree with you, Tamar, that a good television mini-series
can do justice to a novel. I have re-read “Pride and Prejudice” these last few
days. I think my mental movie of it now derives quite a lot from the excellent
BBC version. I seem to remember that there were two or three points, when I
watched it originally, when I thought, Oh, surely not – and then consulted the
text, and there it was.
But I don’t worry, now that I am so old. I take your point,
Quinn, about not wanting to disturb the long-held mental image. (I think, for
me, “Little Women” takes place at my grandmother’s house in Constantine.) But I
think I can either brush a new version aside, if it isn’t right; or adopt bits
of it, as in the case of “Pride and Prejudice”.
My mental pictures have changed over the years when the books are ones I go back to often. So different films are just like another reading. What has been seared into my soul was a film I was taken to see at about eight years old. In it, Heidi gets Clara up and walking in FRANKFURT.Then they go to the mountains. Thus cancelling the entire point of the story - that it is the mountains and the simple food that are the healing agency. Can you imagine just how furious an eight year old could be at such vandalism?!
ReplyDeleteI avoid seeing film versions of books I have read if I can. They (naturally) never match my imagination.
ReplyDeleteBTW I have now seen the video clip of your Helen and the mosaics. It was most interesting and we have agreed that mosaics and yarn scrumbling have much in common.
Gooseberries and eastern white pine (Pinus strobus, a North American species) are both host to a rust fungus, which spends part of its life on the gooseberry and the other part on the pines, doing severe damage to the pines.
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Two of my favourite books are "Cold Mountain" and "The Shipping News". In both cases the film version is very good indeed, but a different experience, since the medium has different features. In "The Shipping News" Julianne Moore is playing a much more modern Wavey Prowse than the one in the book.
ReplyDeleteYour comment, Jean, sent me flying to Wikipedia and other entries on the Internet re "gooseberries". Much to my surprise there were none about it being poisonous. Perhaps in my early youth I distorted someone else's words and held it as truth all these years. It could be they were referring to the fungus described by Anonymous. I also learned they are common in Europe, not so much in America which might be the real reason for their scarcity here and also the reason why my husband has never even heard of them! Chloe
ReplyDeleteEvery last one of the movie versions of Little Women was fine with me. I loved that book and read it more than once - along with its sequels. And of course, who didn't identify with Jo?:)
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