Current reading

I'm not up for anything very intense at the moment (probably killed too many brain cells over the festering period) and so I am reading a mainstream novel at the moment. Its charming but flighty heroine marries for wealth rather than love, cares more about horse-riding, seeing her (male) friends and dancing than her marital duties, and has a child whom she feels very little for and can't mourn when it dies. The supporting cast include feminist composers ('I'll never get married. I fall in love with people about 3 times a week'), Eurotrashy aristocrats, several gay characters, and a couple of divorcees.

The most old-fashioned thing about it is that all the women smoke cigs. And yet it was written in 1893 - it's EF Benson's 'Dodo' trilogy, written some considerable time before his Lucia novels. Reading it, you realise how stuffy the late Victorians weren't.

La Union des Peasants Francais

Today we have:

- dug the garden
-cleaned the woodshed
- cut enough firewood for a week
- made 3 lots of stock (ham bone, turkey, duck)
- assembled a cassoulet

and I am now about to send in my application for the French Peasants Union, though this will probably be rejected as T informs me that the Yog Shoggoth Thing I spent ages digging up out of the front flower bed is in fact asparagus and it takes several years to reach a maturity which I have now blighted. I haven't grown it before and thus did not know. It doesn't look like asparagus!