Plant update

The first mesembryanthemum is finally in flower -- it is, unsurprisingly, pink. The poached-egg plants are *very* belatedly starting to burst their newly-formed flower buds, as are the marigolds and the self-sown corn-marigolds that I have allowed to mature, but none of them are actually in flower yet.

To my surprise the saved nasturtium and coriander seed *is* now coming up (it has, after all, only been two weeks, though it seems like much longer...) I have successful germination amongst the Gypsophila elegans, which now need thinning out, but am sceptical as to whether any of the things that have germinated in the other two compartments are anything but weeds -- I might just possibly have a stray pink Swan River daisy in the next-door compartment, but otherwise I think the seed utterly failed :-(

( Calendula, rudbeckia and honesty )

"Ballerina", Edward Stewart

This book is basically "The Red Shoes" meets "A Chorus Line" or the love-child of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins, a behind-the-scenes expose of ballet life: ambition, manipulation, back-stabbing, love affairs and friendships gone sour ... and it's really good. ( Read more... )

I think where it really scores, at least for me, is the three-dimensional even-handedness with which it handles the characters - the novel opens in Steph's point of view and she is probably the nearest thing we have to a main protagonist, but we get a moment of revelation where pretty much everyone is concerned in which we see the world through their eyes and understand that they are doing what seems to them the right thing where their own values are concerned.

For the older generation, there are still memories of the Nazis and the Second World War - for the very oldest, the Russian Revolution still echoes, and the lost age of Imperial ballet. Marius Volmar is a 'sacred monster' along the lines of Boris Lermontov (and very probably based on the same real-life model) who deliberately manipulates both Steph and Chris for his own ends, but he does it not because he is a sadist but in a quest to restore a long-lost Tchaikovsky ballet scene which for him is the Holy Grail, a device that in fact forms the framing structure for the entire plot. ( Read more... )