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shewhomustWhere've I been, what've I been doing?
To the Blue Room last Sunday, to hear Valerie Laws read; Valerie was terrific, as ever - I could have done with more than ten minutes, which is all the Blue Room allocates to each reader. The evening finished with music from Nathalie Stern, who records and loops her vocals to create a choir of herself: which doesn't sound like the sort of thing I would enjoy, but works wonderfully. Her MySpace page doesn't seem to offer any samples, but her work in duo LakeMe has a similar flavour.
We took an unexpected afternoon off on Wednesday for a flying visit from our friend Jenny; a lovely treat, a chance to catch up and gossip. Jenny lives in Paris, and we don't see her often enough.
Thursday back to the Lit & Phil for another taste of their Sense of Place programme: Ann Cleeves talking about Shetland, how she first went there, why she loves it and how she came to be writing a quartet of crime novels set in Shetland. She made me very impatient to revisit the Northern Isles (and rather smug that we shall do so this spring).
There was working, of course: quite busy just now, trying to balance the small jobs and the larger ones, the urgent ones and the longer term. Nothing out of the ordinary, and all interesting - and sometimes challenging - work.
Plus shopping and housework - a minimum of housework - to be ready for weekend visitors: of which the interesting (to me, at any rate) bit was spotting a set of kitchen chairs in a charity shop, not beautiful antique chairs, but five matching, functional chairs which will do until those beautiful antiques turn up. For a long time we've had a collection of odd wooden chairs, and first one then another fell apart, until we couldn't seat four around the kitchen table without bringing in a chair from the dining room - and now we can. Plus I've commandeered the nicest of the old chairs for my desk. At present there are surplus chairs wandering around the house, but soon there will be a trip to the tip... (At the same time I bought six small tumblers for our breakfast fruit juice; elegance is restored to the breakfast table, but now I have to find room in the cupboard).
Our weekend guests were my cousins J and F: this is the Sunderland side of the family, and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance was kind enough to join us on Saturday morning and walk us through the Sculpture Project. It was a beautiful bright, blowy day, constantly threatening rain from dark skies then blowing over to sunshine again, and I can't think of a better way to have spent it. We also did much talking - about family, and books we had read and liked (or not read / not liked), and the joys of YouTube, and things we remembered, and things we had forgotten. I took out the file of family papers which my father had gathered together, and found the cutting from the Sunderland local paper which my cousin had apparently never seen, reporting his father's graduation from the University of Edinburgh in the 1930s with a first class degree in history: it was awarded by the then Chancellor of the University, Sir J.M. Barrie.
And this morning we polished off the alphabetical jigsaw crossword set by Araucaria in yesterday's Guardian. All of which is quite enough excitement for one week.
To the Blue Room last Sunday, to hear Valerie Laws read; Valerie was terrific, as ever - I could have done with more than ten minutes, which is all the Blue Room allocates to each reader. The evening finished with music from Nathalie Stern, who records and loops her vocals to create a choir of herself: which doesn't sound like the sort of thing I would enjoy, but works wonderfully. Her MySpace page doesn't seem to offer any samples, but her work in duo LakeMe has a similar flavour.
We took an unexpected afternoon off on Wednesday for a flying visit from our friend Jenny; a lovely treat, a chance to catch up and gossip. Jenny lives in Paris, and we don't see her often enough.
Thursday back to the Lit & Phil for another taste of their Sense of Place programme: Ann Cleeves talking about Shetland, how she first went there, why she loves it and how she came to be writing a quartet of crime novels set in Shetland. She made me very impatient to revisit the Northern Isles (and rather smug that we shall do so this spring).
There was working, of course: quite busy just now, trying to balance the small jobs and the larger ones, the urgent ones and the longer term. Nothing out of the ordinary, and all interesting - and sometimes challenging - work.
Plus shopping and housework - a minimum of housework - to be ready for weekend visitors: of which the interesting (to me, at any rate) bit was spotting a set of kitchen chairs in a charity shop, not beautiful antique chairs, but five matching, functional chairs which will do until those beautiful antiques turn up. For a long time we've had a collection of odd wooden chairs, and first one then another fell apart, until we couldn't seat four around the kitchen table without bringing in a chair from the dining room - and now we can. Plus I've commandeered the nicest of the old chairs for my desk. At present there are surplus chairs wandering around the house, but soon there will be a trip to the tip... (At the same time I bought six small tumblers for our breakfast fruit juice; elegance is restored to the breakfast table, but now I have to find room in the cupboard).
Our weekend guests were my cousins J and F: this is the Sunderland side of the family, and
desperance was kind enough to join us on Saturday morning and walk us through the Sculpture Project. It was a beautiful bright, blowy day, constantly threatening rain from dark skies then blowing over to sunshine again, and I can't think of a better way to have spent it. We also did much talking - about family, and books we had read and liked (or not read / not liked), and the joys of YouTube, and things we remembered, and things we had forgotten. I took out the file of family papers which my father had gathered together, and found the cutting from the Sunderland local paper which my cousin had apparently never seen, reporting his father's graduation from the University of Edinburgh in the 1930s with a first class degree in history: it was awarded by the then Chancellor of the University, Sir J.M. Barrie.And this morning we polished off the alphabetical jigsaw crossword set by Araucaria in yesterday's Guardian. All of which is quite enough excitement for one week.
