If I was to take George MacDonald literally I would suspect
that the fairies had left the building this week. I’ve either not slept at all
or slept too much, been to hot or too cold, undercooked or burnt things, and
been unable to settle down to reading anything very much. I’ve been working my
way through George MacDonald’s ‘The Complete Fairy Tales’ – on the traditional
fairy time line; what should have taken a few hours has inexplicably taken days.
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| Arthur Rackham |
I don’t know if my inability to concentrate on anything very
much book wise has been influenced by the number of short story collections I
have stacked up waiting to be read at the moment. It’s mostly been the Fairy
Tales, but there have been forays into Robert Aickman’s ‘The Wine-Dark Sea’ and
I really want to be reading some John O’Hara shorts that are currently laying
in a seductive manner by my bed. That and there are a bundle of novels and
novellas I can’t wait to get to including Trollope’s Palliser series, and
should I order a handful of the Stella Gibbons print on demands from Vintage?
Truthfully I can’t afford to buy anything at the moment and
when I can the first thing on the list will be work shoes (sensible black ones
with nothing fun or frivolous about them) and although at £9.99 a throw the
Vintage reprints are cheaper than a lot of print on demands they’re still not especially
cheap and there are so many tempting titles. The dilemma is this – it seems the
Nevil Shute’s that started out as pod’s were so popular that they quite quickly
made it onto the main list (Is this what happened with the Somerset Maugham’s
as well I wonder?) Should this happen for Gibbons it will mean more of the
really very pretty covers (if I didn’t care about the covers I’d probably have
an e reader so it does matter) and most likely slightly lower prices – both good
things. But if people like me don’t buy the books now...
Going back to the fairies and the kitchen – the kitchen has
been strange recently. Again if I took MacDonald literally I would be blaming
the little folk and certainly cultivating better domestic habits. My freezer is
weird (what follows is gripping edge of the seat stuff) I’ve been slowly emptying
it with a view to a defrost since the spring so now it’s mostly full of
approximately a half hundred weight of Seville oranges, a brace of elderly
grouse, and something that’s buried in perma frost. I don’t remember buying so
many oranges and am beginning to suspect that they’re somehow multiplying.
Irrationality born of late nights and lack of sleep you think? Well the hash
browns I found last week tasted of orange, and more sinister the kippers I
defrosted last night smelt of oranges. Kippers. Kippers can normally hold their
own in the scent stakes. And really – there are a lot of oranges. Got to do
something about the oranges.
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