Igenlode Wordsmith

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... )

For the record, the dark-leaf chilli is *not* Explosive Ember but Zimbabwe Black. (I asked the owner of the original plant, and she remembered what variety she had planted two seasons ago!)

Apparently they are rated as much milder on the Scoville scale than the Demon Red (circa 20-30,000 ("fairly mild") as versus 50,000 ("moderate to hot")), which explains why biting an unripe purple chilli was really not hot at all...

I have planted the two surviving dwindled narcissus bulbs out again (one of the three that I lifted this summer turned out to have been eaten out from the inside and was quite hollow). I found five of them in total, the other two being rotted, and despite emptying out more pots have no idea what happened to the remainder of the original seven, or which was the "one pot with visible bulb foliage in it" back in July :(
( Red Shoes fic )

I've been re-watching the first series of "Life on Mars", and was rather surprised by the frequent (in the last few episodes at least) references to Gene Hunt as being married. He certainly doesn't seem to be encumbered by a wife for the purposes of "Ashes to Ashes", let alone taking exception because a colleague 'made a pass at the Gov's missus'...

I also watched the musical broadcast of "Kinky Boots", which left me with the impression that the original film was probably a rather attractive Ealing Studios-type drama that I would have enjoyed watching. Unfortunately I didn't like the music at all.
Likewise the Matthew Bourne ballet version of "The Red Shoes" ended up simply inspiring me with a desire to see the Powell & Pressburger film (I may just have a videotape of it somewhere). ( Read more... )