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igenlodeJust as I was giving up on both, I seem to have a dark-leaf chilli and an outdoors towel-tomato germinating -- very probably triggered off by the warmer weather a couple of days ago. Neither has as yet got to the seed-leaf stage, though, and given the return of yet more cold spring days I'm not sure how good their prognosis is.
I do have a couple of definite nasturtium shoots, though, which are more likely to be hardy. And I have two definite mesembryanthemums and think there may be more coming; they are just slow. I am bringing those in at night, though.
I am nearly at the end of the Gigi-story (and still no nearer to having a name for it) in that I have completed my 'extra' scene with Liane, or at least at Liane's dinner-party (she only gets a couple of lines, poor woman; Gaston needs to be definitely 'off' her, and yet I don't want to bash her unnecessarily. She is hard as nails and given to dramatisation, but then she needs to be -- after all Aunt Alicia has many of the same traits and was in the same profession...)
What I haven't 'discovered' yet is how I am actually going to get Gaston to make his canonical re-appearance on Gigi's doorstep the next morning. I've managed to introduce the subject of marriage quite separately from the idea of marrying *Gigi*, such that it has at least plausibly been shown to have crossed his mind, but I am not myself clear as to whether he can have turned up with the idea of making a proposal as some kind of solution to the fact that she had rejected the 'indecent proposal' that he and her grandmother had cooked up between them :-(
Gigi herself immediately jumps to the conclusion that he has returned in order to pester her again ("Vous venez pour me faire encore de la peine"), and coming back for the hat clearly *is* an excuse -- but the only information Colette gives us on what Gaston's intentions are at this point is that he interrupts her approach to him because he is afraid of what she might say: presumably what he anticipates at this point is that she is going to reject him again and even more adamantly. And it just doesn't seem likely from his abashed demeanour or from his prior knowledge/experience of her and her family that he would be arriving with the idea of proposing marriage: her grandmother has other plans for her, and Gigi has done nothing that would lead him to suspect her surprise volte-face, when she tells him she would rather be his mistress than lose him altogether.
Yet when she does consent, his immediate reaction is to ask for her hand. He doesn't *need* to -- if all he wants is Gigi in his life, then he has just been given that on a plate. So he must have been thinking about marriage on at least some level; it just doesn't seem likely that the original purpose of his contrived visit that morning was to propose an engagement then and there, because he has no reason to expect that to go well at all :-(
(And in terms of story structure I don't think I want to go all the way through a rewrite of that canon scene; I want to end with it still in potentia, with the irony of the reader knowing the outcome when the protagonist has no idea of what is coming. Unfortunately since there is no 'fandom' whatsoever for this, the only people likely to be reading it are those who are browsing my profile for some reason or other, and they probably *won't* know the outcome...)
I do have a couple of definite nasturtium shoots, though, which are more likely to be hardy. And I have two definite mesembryanthemums and think there may be more coming; they are just slow. I am bringing those in at night, though.
I am nearly at the end of the Gigi-story (and still no nearer to having a name for it) in that I have completed my 'extra' scene with Liane, or at least at Liane's dinner-party (she only gets a couple of lines, poor woman; Gaston needs to be definitely 'off' her, and yet I don't want to bash her unnecessarily. She is hard as nails and given to dramatisation, but then she needs to be -- after all Aunt Alicia has many of the same traits and was in the same profession...)
What I haven't 'discovered' yet is how I am actually going to get Gaston to make his canonical re-appearance on Gigi's doorstep the next morning. I've managed to introduce the subject of marriage quite separately from the idea of marrying *Gigi*, such that it has at least plausibly been shown to have crossed his mind, but I am not myself clear as to whether he can have turned up with the idea of making a proposal as some kind of solution to the fact that she had rejected the 'indecent proposal' that he and her grandmother had cooked up between them :-(
Gigi herself immediately jumps to the conclusion that he has returned in order to pester her again ("Vous venez pour me faire encore de la peine"), and coming back for the hat clearly *is* an excuse -- but the only information Colette gives us on what Gaston's intentions are at this point is that he interrupts her approach to him because he is afraid of what she might say: presumably what he anticipates at this point is that she is going to reject him again and even more adamantly. And it just doesn't seem likely from his abashed demeanour or from his prior knowledge/experience of her and her family that he would be arriving with the idea of proposing marriage: her grandmother has other plans for her, and Gigi has done nothing that would lead him to suspect her surprise volte-face, when she tells him she would rather be his mistress than lose him altogether.
Yet when she does consent, his immediate reaction is to ask for her hand. He doesn't *need* to -- if all he wants is Gigi in his life, then he has just been given that on a plate. So he must have been thinking about marriage on at least some level; it just doesn't seem likely that the original purpose of his contrived visit that morning was to propose an engagement then and there, because he has no reason to expect that to go well at all :-(
(And in terms of story structure I don't think I want to go all the way through a rewrite of that canon scene; I want to end with it still in potentia, with the irony of the reader knowing the outcome when the protagonist has no idea of what is coming. Unfortunately since there is no 'fandom' whatsoever for this, the only people likely to be reading it are those who are browsing my profile for some reason or other, and they probably *won't* know the outcome...)