Beginning to look like Christmas... or late summer?

The first Christmas concert of the year took place on December 1st and out of doors... in the rain, unfortunately! We were reasonably sheltered (violins: not waterproof), the music, being closer to the edge of the canopy, got a bit wet from rain blowing in, and the poor young conductor who was stuck out in front had to put his hood up ;-) Amazingly, people did actually stand around under umbrellas and listen.


The mystery pink Linaria is still flowering despite a couple of hard frosts; it appears to have got to the stage of becoming part of the local 'seed bank' in the soil, since I'm pretty sure I didn't plant it in all those places. Which is just as well, because the seed is tiny and hard to collect, and the flowers are pretty and evidently thrive in the somewhat specialised local conditions! It is definitely bigger and more colourful than the native toadflax.

I have been given a packet of dwarf pea seed and have planted some indoors to see if I can get some over-winter peashoots off it (and to see if it is viable). Homegrown peas do tend to be a waste of time, as you get a pathetically small crop for a lot of effort...

Everything else has died back, even the second-generation marigolds and at least one of the kale plants. Except, unexpectedly, for the yellow mesembryanthemums, which are definitely not supposed to be frost-hardy! The seed-pods on those might just ripen, but of course they are currently very soggy indeed...

"The Elusive Pimpernel", Baroness Orczy

"The Elusive Pimpernel" in an odd sense serves as a sequel in parallel to *both* the original novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and to its follow-up, "I Will Repay"; it is far closer to the former in setting and content, being a return to the familiar characters and tropes of the original hit, and yet the beginning of the story directly references the events of "I Will Repay", and uses Juliette Marny and her family jewels as a trigger for the main plot. ( Read more... )

Orczy evidently decided that Chauvelin was far too good a character to waste; it is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for him (small and slight in build, highly intelligent, isolated among his colleagues, and vulnerable not to physical danger but ridicule) and while the format of the genre means that he is always doomed to lose, one feels that this tug of appeal is almost certainly intentional on the part of the author. In the opening scene with Robespierre we are given quite a new perspective on Chauvelin, being told that he had once been part of the ruling group alongside Robespierre, but that the latter had subsequently consciously attempted to sideline him as a potential threat because he was not only "keen and clever", "trusted and respected", but "possessed all those qualities of selfless patriotism" which the other, characterised as "the most ambitious, self-seeking demagogue of his time", conspicuously lacked: in other words, Chauvelin is a danger because he genuinely embodies those virtues for which Robespierre, famously dubbed 'the sea-green Incorruptible', is known in public.
( Read more... )