![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
A Tale of Two Cities and Tea-Towels
Finally did many months of ironing while listening to Sir John Gielgud reading an adaptation of "A Tale of Two Cities", somewhat oddly abridged to fit on two cassettes; much of it was done in great detail, but almost all the events between Darnay's return to France and his condemnation were omitted, of which the most obvious excision was not only Doctor Manette's initial intervention but the entirety of his backstory as revealed at that point, so that we never find out why he was in the Bastille in the first place or why Madame Defarge is so determined on the deaths of Darnay and his whole family! I did appreciate Dickens' whimsical prose, though, hearing it read out loud, and given the length constraints it may have been the right choice to keep in the narrator's musings and leave out what would have had to have been a very much condensed chunk of plot -- it was a bit strange, however, to show the document being found, show it being produced in court, show the public reaction to hearing its contents, even depict (elsewhere) Dr Manette's affliction at the name of Evrémonde, and yet never to say at any point what was actually in that account that produced so strong a response...
Things highlighted by the audio production that I hadn't remembered: Lucie has a second child, a little boy who dies early on in her marriage, and Darnay spends over a year stuck in prison awaiting trial (I think this may have been a side-effect of simplifying the various hearings into a single short verdict!) I was thinking of little Lucie as a toddler, but in fact she must have been a lot older than that by the end of the book.
The (boiled, ironed and folded) tea-towels will have to take the place of the erstwhile ironing pile, I think, in order to prevent further occurrences of mould. I now have a new microwave which states categorically that items must not be placed on top of it, so I need to find space for all the things that were previously stored on top of the old microwave (like my steam iron), and the corner where I was piling the tea-towels is the obvious candidate, given that it clearly wasn't a good place to keep them. I'm not sure that on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom is a terribly convenient place to keep tea-towels either, but at least it is -- if not warm -- lacking in condensation.
Things highlighted by the audio production that I hadn't remembered: Lucie has a second child, a little boy who dies early on in her marriage, and Darnay spends over a year stuck in prison awaiting trial (I think this may have been a side-effect of simplifying the various hearings into a single short verdict!) I was thinking of little Lucie as a toddler, but in fact she must have been a lot older than that by the end of the book.
The (boiled, ironed and folded) tea-towels will have to take the place of the erstwhile ironing pile, I think, in order to prevent further occurrences of mould. I now have a new microwave which states categorically that items must not be placed on top of it, so I need to find space for all the things that were previously stored on top of the old microwave (like my steam iron), and the corner where I was piling the tea-towels is the obvious candidate, given that it clearly wasn't a good place to keep them. I'm not sure that on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom is a terribly convenient place to keep tea-towels either, but at least it is -- if not warm -- lacking in condensation.