English: no wonder it has so many words...

(...if people will keep making them up...)

The word "thistlish" doesn't seem to exist. Or didn't, until I wrote it in this novel. I still think I like it better than "thistleish", though; that "e" just looks redundant to me, if it isn't contributing to pronunciation-guidance.

The word "tetradelphous", though, absolutely does occur. Too bad I have no way to use it.

Nicol Williamson

Nicol Williamson has died. More than a month ago, apparently, but it's only just been announced by his son Luke.

I saw his Macbeth at Stratford in the '70s, with Helen Mirren, just (I think) a year after the famous minimalist McKellen/Dench production in the studio theatre. That was like an exercise in contrasts: intimacy against extravagance, repression against rampant sexuality. I adored them both, but hey, I was a teenager, however much I wanted to pose as an intellectual; it was the Williamson that fuelled my imagination. For a while there I tried to see whatever he was doing (or had already done, in cinema). But then there didn't seem to be very much. (Tho' I did find his abridged recording of The Hobbit. Being read to by a record player: it seems so odd, in retrospect.)

If I'd wanted an icy needle shower, y'know, I'd have dialled one up

Brrr!

*changes clothes, dries hairlessness*

In retail adventures on the way, I did not hear a mixed group of pensioners on the escalator saying how much they liked to watch nude dancers doing the foxtrot. No. I did not. I misheard that, for sure. However loudly they spoke. They probably said "new". "New" dancers. Yes. That'll be it, then.

And there were no more soft cod's roes to be had, as I feared, but I did remember parcel tape.

In other news, cookery books are heavy. And my back hurts. I'm sure that's unrelated.

Before all that, I wrote 1200 words and finished my chapter and proofed a chapter of House of Bells. I should probably start another chapter now, but... yeah. Maybe I'll go talk to the vet instead.

A propos of nothing in particular, did you know that the Secular Games were a religious celebration? Like the secular clergy, it's not oxymoronic at all.

Pretty helpful things

So I was taking photos of the boys being helpful in the book-packing department, and the camera decided to stop being helpful, on the grounds that its card was All Full Now. And then I remembered why I didn't like downloading photos from my camera any more, because I didn't get on with the picture-management software that Ubuntu supplies; but I went with it anyway, faute de mieux, and actually I have no idea why I took agin it because it's pretty damn smart actually, and its only problem is that the camera has reset its own date and I don't know how to adjust it to make it, y'know, right.

Anyway. I have downloaded about 800 photos, from Portland and San Francisco and Paris and Staffordshire and such. Anyone would think I was a traveller or something, and not the stay-at-homebody that actually I am.

Here is a pretty from a Japanese garden, possibly in Portland, Oregon:


And here is Mac being helpful:


And here is Barry, also being helpful:


I have packed all my far-eastern cookery books! I have three boxes of Asian, two of Indian and one of Chinese. Yes, I too am surprised by the proportions, but there's a lot of countries in Asia, and when one has books of Balinese cookery and so forth, they soon add up. In piles of unusual shape, which adds an interest to the packing.