"If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle"

As you know, Bob, this journal since its inception has been titled "The Idle Solitary". Of course we all blame Johnson.

But! I am solitary no longer, being married and all. I should think of something other.

In the meantime, I am not idle either. Yester evening we went to the Meadery in pursuit of friends (largely because I had forgotten to give a friend an envelope, but hey), and committed socialising. Katherine (who made our wedding favours, and danced our health) came home with us after; I cooked chicken with couscous and salad and no harissa (for lack of any harissa! I could make my own, but where would I find it, around here?), and we drank quantities of wine and went to bed eventually.

And roused too early this morning - poor Katherine! - to head for the farmers' market and an allotment plant sale. John drove us home, as I had a bagful of veggies and a boxful of plants: tomatoes and chillies and cucumber and tomatillo and sugar snap peas and boysenberry canes. We'll see what lives, what thrives.

This afternoon I have planted out the peas and boysens against numerous sunny walls, in a spirit of bold experimentation. T'others I'm going to keep in pots in the clubhouse for a little while, until we're sure the nights won't grow too cool; I may not have killed the early tomatoes and chillies, but I'm sure I've stunted them.

And all day I've had a line of poetry in my head, like an itch that needed scratching. I have determinedly turned it into the first line of a story, as I don't write poetry any more; and then I failed to stop, and now I have a page and a half and I appear to be writing an SF story about exile and anxiety and art. Gosh, I wonder where that can possibly have come from?

If I should fall from grace with grace itself,
Lose art, lose any sense of circumstance...

Pronounability: who's he again?

From Wikipedia's entry on Zola's Germinal:

The novel's central character is Étienne Lantier, previously seen in L'Assommoir (1877), a young migrant worker who arrives at the foreboding coal mining town of Montsou in the bleak area of the far north of France to earn a living as a miner. Sacked from his previous job on the railways for assaulting a superior, Étienne was originally to have been the central character in Zola's "murder on the trains" thriller La Bête humaine (1890) before the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Germinal persuaded him otherwise: he befriends the veteran miner Maheu, who finds him somewhere to stay and gets him a job pushing the carts down the pit.

Someone really should sort out those pronouns. Or preferably rewrite the whole damn thing.