The Prince and the Pekingese
Jun. 1st, 2013 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
todayiamadaisyI've been to Brisbane, f-list. I'm back now.
The way the flight worked out, I ended up landing too late to go to either the ballet or the play that I had you vote on. Only when I checked in, Qantas' automatic checker-inner thing offered me an earlier flight, which I took, wishing I had bought a ballet ticket after all. Only then we were delayed for fifty minutes before leaving Melbourne, and for another fifty minutes before landing at Brisbane, so I ended up landing more or less when I was originally meant to. The plus side, though, was that my original flight was also delayed, so at least I landed earlier than I would have.
The bit of Brisbane that I saw seemed very nice. My hotel room overlooked some sort of sports ground. The restaurant where I ate my breakfast overlooked the river. I went for a walk along the riverside pathway, which is apparently an unusual thing to do, as I was the only one doing it. Just me and a lot of white ibis. I have a poor sense of direction, so I never dare go far in a strange city if I have to be somewhere by a particular time. I got cocky after walking in a straight line along the river and back again, so I decided to get a bit fancy and go around the block. It turned out that the block was weirdly shaped, though, so after walking in what I thought was a square, I wasn't back on the road I was expecting to be on. Then I noticed that I was standing near the sports ground (actually race track) I could see from my hotel window, so I used that to calibrate my inner compass and arrived back in time to clean my teeth, check out, and get to my accounting meeting. Phew, hey?
The reason the flight there was late was because Brisbane had had heavy rainfall that day, then I landed in Melbourne last night in time for the heaviest storm in years. It rained all the way home this morning, too. I don't want to sound paranoid, but I think the rain is following me. Novel as it was to wake up to daylight in Brisbane and spend the day working in short sleeves, arriving home to dark and wind and rain did make me think, this is weather.
When my flight home was boarding, after I was seated, a middle-aged man in a business suit got on and found his seat. He blocked the aisle to put his bag in the overhead compartment, the way everyone does. He lifted his bag above his head, only to find there was already a bag in the spot for his bag. He put his bag down and looked around, stunned. He lifted his bag again and started to put it on top of the bag already there. He realised that the bag already there was soft and would be squashed by his hard case, so he put his down again. He started to lift the other bag and slip his bag under it, then he stopped and put his bag on the ground and looked around, shocked that he had touched someone else's bag. He looked in the locker across the aisle from his. He looked in the locker in front of his. Eventually he found a space in the locker behind his. He went to his seat and started to sit. The man behind him stopped leaning on the seats and started to move. But the first man wasn't finished. Just before he made contact with the seat, he jumped up and went back to his bag. He unzipped a compartment and felt for something. It wasn't there. He unzipped another compartment and felt around. He unzipped a third compartment and found what he was after: his complimentary headphones, which he could only have picked up on the way onto the plane. He went back to his seat. He looked as though he was about to sit, but he didn't. He turned around and went back to his bag, this time to zip up the three compartments he'd just opened. Finally, he sat down, and the queue moved on with no-one telling him to hurry up or anything.
The bus from the airport stops at the train station, and my hotel for last night was directly across the road, the better to catch the early train home this morning. A wild-eyed man was standing outside the train station shouting how there was a woman in the Bible, he couldn't remember her name but she had homophobia, and then she met Jesus and he cured her of the bleeding that hadn't stopped for years. Someone walking past said to him, 'You mean haemophilia, mate,' and the man said, 'Yes, he cured that too.' I was waiting to cross the road to my hotel when a man stopped me and asked the way to Collins Street. I'd like to know what it is about me that gives the impression I know the way to go, because it's sending the wrong signal. Then again, the choice was between me and the wild-eyed Jesus fan, so, yeah. Anyway, even though I have a poor sense of direction, I *can* read street signs, so I sent him in the right direction. Job done.
I organised my mother to look after Percy while I was away. I though she was just going to pop in now and then, but she and John actually came in and stayed for two nights. 'We had to stay, to put the heater on for him,' my mother explained, 'so he didn't get cold, poor love.' Also, she's been heating his dinner in the microwave, 'just to take the chill off it'. What a spoilt cat.
May books
* Midwinter Nightingale - Joan Aiken
* The Witch of Clatteringshaws - Joan Aiken
* Fever - Mary Beth Keane
* Black Ships Before Troy - Rosemary Sutcliff
* The Wanderings of Odysseus - Rosemary Sutcliff
* The Aeneid - Virgil (translation JW Mackail)
* In Search of a Homeland - Penelope Lively
* The Whispering Mountain - Joan Aiken
I've finally finished Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles. That includes the hard to come by companion book/prequel, The Whispering Mountain, which is the best one by far. That's the one to go for if alternate history novels for children are your thing. The Witch of Clatteringshaws wrapped things up weirdly and abruptly, but there was an author's note at the end explaining that she knew she was sick and thought it was better to draft a short book than leave a longer one unfinished. So that makes sense. Anyway, I've read them all now. It took longer than I thought it would, and it was mostly good.
Fever is a fictional biography of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, the infamous cook in New York in the early 1900s who was the first discovered healthy carrier of typhoid. It's the sort of book that makes you sigh, oh bureaucracy. They didn't treat her well. Men in white coats turned up at the house she was working at and wanted her to come quietly; they arrested her without a warrant and kept her quarantined in a TB hospital without visitors for two years; they didn't arrest and quarantine later healthy carriers who caused much greater numbers of casualties; and when they finally let her go, they made her promise never to cook again, but didn't offer to compensate her for the loss of income over the previous two years or for the drop in wages taking menial positions. And then they were surprised when she went back to cooking. Oh, bureaucracy. Mary herself, though, wasn't an entirely sympathetic character, which made her much more real, I felt. (Reading a bit more about her, she seems to have been even less sympathetic than the book makes her. The book has her going to work at her final job in a maternity hospital, hearing about a typhoid outbreak and giving herself up to the authorities when she sees them; in reality, she apparently disappeared once that final typhoid outbreak was confirmed and had to be tracked down.) Anyway, I enjoyed it very much.
I've been listening to The Great Courses of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I've read The Iliad, and The Odyssey before, so instead of re-reading them, I read Rosemary Sutcliff's versions, which were written for children. They were excellent, I must say. She managed to keep the flavour of the originals, including a few of Homer's entertaining similes, and kept the story going right up to the fall of Troy, instead of stopping at the death of Hector. I hadn't read The Aeneid before, so I grabbed it off Project Gutenberg. I didn't enjoy it as much, I have to admit. I thought maybe it was the translation, so I followed it up with In Search of a Homeland by Penelope Lively, which is a companion to the Sutcliff books, and I didn't enjoy it as much either. So Homer > Virgil is what I've learnt this month. (I enjoyed The Great Courses lectures on all three too, I should say.)
The way the flight worked out, I ended up landing too late to go to either the ballet or the play that I had you vote on. Only when I checked in, Qantas' automatic checker-inner thing offered me an earlier flight, which I took, wishing I had bought a ballet ticket after all. Only then we were delayed for fifty minutes before leaving Melbourne, and for another fifty minutes before landing at Brisbane, so I ended up landing more or less when I was originally meant to. The plus side, though, was that my original flight was also delayed, so at least I landed earlier than I would have.
The bit of Brisbane that I saw seemed very nice. My hotel room overlooked some sort of sports ground. The restaurant where I ate my breakfast overlooked the river. I went for a walk along the riverside pathway, which is apparently an unusual thing to do, as I was the only one doing it. Just me and a lot of white ibis. I have a poor sense of direction, so I never dare go far in a strange city if I have to be somewhere by a particular time. I got cocky after walking in a straight line along the river and back again, so I decided to get a bit fancy and go around the block. It turned out that the block was weirdly shaped, though, so after walking in what I thought was a square, I wasn't back on the road I was expecting to be on. Then I noticed that I was standing near the sports ground (actually race track) I could see from my hotel window, so I used that to calibrate my inner compass and arrived back in time to clean my teeth, check out, and get to my accounting meeting. Phew, hey?
The reason the flight there was late was because Brisbane had had heavy rainfall that day, then I landed in Melbourne last night in time for the heaviest storm in years. It rained all the way home this morning, too. I don't want to sound paranoid, but I think the rain is following me. Novel as it was to wake up to daylight in Brisbane and spend the day working in short sleeves, arriving home to dark and wind and rain did make me think, this is weather.
When my flight home was boarding, after I was seated, a middle-aged man in a business suit got on and found his seat. He blocked the aisle to put his bag in the overhead compartment, the way everyone does. He lifted his bag above his head, only to find there was already a bag in the spot for his bag. He put his bag down and looked around, stunned. He lifted his bag again and started to put it on top of the bag already there. He realised that the bag already there was soft and would be squashed by his hard case, so he put his down again. He started to lift the other bag and slip his bag under it, then he stopped and put his bag on the ground and looked around, shocked that he had touched someone else's bag. He looked in the locker across the aisle from his. He looked in the locker in front of his. Eventually he found a space in the locker behind his. He went to his seat and started to sit. The man behind him stopped leaning on the seats and started to move. But the first man wasn't finished. Just before he made contact with the seat, he jumped up and went back to his bag. He unzipped a compartment and felt for something. It wasn't there. He unzipped another compartment and felt around. He unzipped a third compartment and found what he was after: his complimentary headphones, which he could only have picked up on the way onto the plane. He went back to his seat. He looked as though he was about to sit, but he didn't. He turned around and went back to his bag, this time to zip up the three compartments he'd just opened. Finally, he sat down, and the queue moved on with no-one telling him to hurry up or anything.
The bus from the airport stops at the train station, and my hotel for last night was directly across the road, the better to catch the early train home this morning. A wild-eyed man was standing outside the train station shouting how there was a woman in the Bible, he couldn't remember her name but she had homophobia, and then she met Jesus and he cured her of the bleeding that hadn't stopped for years. Someone walking past said to him, 'You mean haemophilia, mate,' and the man said, 'Yes, he cured that too.' I was waiting to cross the road to my hotel when a man stopped me and asked the way to Collins Street. I'd like to know what it is about me that gives the impression I know the way to go, because it's sending the wrong signal. Then again, the choice was between me and the wild-eyed Jesus fan, so, yeah. Anyway, even though I have a poor sense of direction, I *can* read street signs, so I sent him in the right direction. Job done.
I organised my mother to look after Percy while I was away. I though she was just going to pop in now and then, but she and John actually came in and stayed for two nights. 'We had to stay, to put the heater on for him,' my mother explained, 'so he didn't get cold, poor love.' Also, she's been heating his dinner in the microwave, 'just to take the chill off it'. What a spoilt cat.
May books
* Midwinter Nightingale - Joan Aiken
* The Witch of Clatteringshaws - Joan Aiken
* Fever - Mary Beth Keane
* Black Ships Before Troy - Rosemary Sutcliff
* The Wanderings of Odysseus - Rosemary Sutcliff
* The Aeneid - Virgil (translation JW Mackail)
* In Search of a Homeland - Penelope Lively
* The Whispering Mountain - Joan Aiken
I've finally finished Joan Aiken's Wolves Chronicles. That includes the hard to come by companion book/prequel, The Whispering Mountain, which is the best one by far. That's the one to go for if alternate history novels for children are your thing. The Witch of Clatteringshaws wrapped things up weirdly and abruptly, but there was an author's note at the end explaining that she knew she was sick and thought it was better to draft a short book than leave a longer one unfinished. So that makes sense. Anyway, I've read them all now. It took longer than I thought it would, and it was mostly good.
Fever is a fictional biography of Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, the infamous cook in New York in the early 1900s who was the first discovered healthy carrier of typhoid. It's the sort of book that makes you sigh, oh bureaucracy. They didn't treat her well. Men in white coats turned up at the house she was working at and wanted her to come quietly; they arrested her without a warrant and kept her quarantined in a TB hospital without visitors for two years; they didn't arrest and quarantine later healthy carriers who caused much greater numbers of casualties; and when they finally let her go, they made her promise never to cook again, but didn't offer to compensate her for the loss of income over the previous two years or for the drop in wages taking menial positions. And then they were surprised when she went back to cooking. Oh, bureaucracy. Mary herself, though, wasn't an entirely sympathetic character, which made her much more real, I felt. (Reading a bit more about her, she seems to have been even less sympathetic than the book makes her. The book has her going to work at her final job in a maternity hospital, hearing about a typhoid outbreak and giving herself up to the authorities when she sees them; in reality, she apparently disappeared once that final typhoid outbreak was confirmed and had to be tracked down.) Anyway, I enjoyed it very much.
I've been listening to The Great Courses of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I've read The Iliad, and The Odyssey before, so instead of re-reading them, I read Rosemary Sutcliff's versions, which were written for children. They were excellent, I must say. She managed to keep the flavour of the originals, including a few of Homer's entertaining similes, and kept the story going right up to the fall of Troy, instead of stopping at the death of Hector. I hadn't read The Aeneid before, so I grabbed it off Project Gutenberg. I didn't enjoy it as much, I have to admit. I thought maybe it was the translation, so I followed it up with In Search of a Homeland by Penelope Lively, which is a companion to the Sutcliff books, and I didn't enjoy it as much either. So Homer > Virgil is what I've learnt this month. (I enjoyed The Great Courses lectures on all three too, I should say.)