Five things make an LJ post every time

1. I'm about to go away for a few days, so this is my last opportunity to post that Sunday is Peter Dickinson's eightieth birthday. robinmckinley, who is, among many other things, his wife, says (in a footnote, because she's good at those) that Peter's little joke is, that if you want to give him a birthday present, buy one of his books. Sounds like a hobbit-style present to me (i.e., the person whose birthday it is confers a gift on the unbirthday people), but too good to turn down, so I've bought myself Angel Isle for a Christmas reading treat. If we had world enough and time, I could compose a meditation on the many and various goodnesses of Peter Dickinson's books, but we haven't.


2. Today's Guardian carries an obituary of Chrissie Glazebrook by Sean O'Brien. Too often you read an obituary (well, yes, that too) and all the facts are correct but the person just isn't there. Not this time - it isn't a long piece, but it does convey the feeling of Chrissie's company, what fun she was to be with.


3. We have booked tickets for the Waterson:Carthy Frost and Fire concert in Darlington. Last year we saw a rather grander version of this concert at the Sage, and were diverted to notice that the tour date nearest to us fell on the winter solstice. This year, by pure fluke, the convenient date for us is, once again, the winter solstice: if you do it twice, especially at Christmas, it's a tradition. Only last year, nineweaving was with us: I wish we could make that a tradition too.


4. We went to the tip this morning, with bottles and cardboard and newspaper and such; going to feed newspaper into the huge container, found that one side of it was full of books. I'm disturbed by the sheer wrongness of this: I'd struggled to recycle one very battered Puffin edition of Prince Caspian, missing a cover, with its pages falling off, and here was this huge quantity of books. They were, admittedly, mostly in Polish, and many of them were things like a technical dictionary of hi-fi and audio, but they were overfolwing from the skip, and it took great strength of mind not to bring great armfuls of them home. I kept it down to three: a book which I thought was a cookbook, but may be about nutrition in more general terms (it has what look very like recipes, but also a picture of someone breastfeeding a baby), Arkady Fiedler's Maly Bizon (adventures of a young native American, to judge by the illustrations) and a collection of poetry by Zbigniew Chalko, with a cloth cover and woodcut illustrations, published by the Poets' and Painters' Press, London, in 1962. Even this is silly, since I don't speak Polish, but they are such very nice books.


5. The gas pressure has been low for some time (the oven had to be coaxed to light) but yesterday it was hardly there at all; I could get a flame on the cooker rings, but neither the grill nor the boiler would ignite. The gas-man came and identified the fault - the regulator valve had shut down - but isn't allowed to touch the meter, so he had to call out the man from the other company, who is allowed to touch the meter, repaired it, and all is now well. It was chilly yesterday, though, and an excuse to light the first open fire of the winter.