Sunday Summary

Thank you all for being lovely this past week and bit while I've been a disgusting, snotty mess with a voice that has teetered between old man, teenage boy and donkey (we're now onto Jo Whiley, which is nice), and a frankly annoying-as-chuff cough that just keeps giving. (Really, it shouldn't bother.)

The grimitude still lingers on but I'm vanquishing it by, well, ignoring it, largely, or suppressing it with Olbas oil and hope.

This week, then, aside from coughing like a decrepit old mule, I have mostly been...

Reading 

Walking

I'm definitely on the mend (praise be): I managed a 1-hour-20 yomp back to Clapham on Thursday and I didn't diiiiiiie. And then a 3-hour yomp round Reigate (9 miles, for the record):

{I like my routes to have an element of whimsy...}

And I'm still aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!

Today's route started at Reigate Station and took me all the way up Pilgrims' Way (veh veh nahce hoises... bit out of my life range), and up through the chalk paths onto the Reigate Hill path. Veh veh nahce views.

{Don't look doooooooown...}

{Selfie with crow's-feet. Fresh air ages me.}

I then trailed a bunch of very earnest walking families with dogs onto a hairpin bend of a path which leads up to this wondrous structure in one corner of the field (a topograph, I'm told):

{View from the top-ograph...}

{#Show me the way to go hooooome...#}

After a long muddy yomp through the Four Acre Wood (sadly not the Hundred Acre Wood...) I found myself on the periphery of Gatton Park again, took a weird turning, walked part way down Wray Lane and rejoined the Gatton walk I'd done previously, but in the opposite direction.

More mud ensued, but it was a gorgeous sunny noontide so no harm done! Plus I had the sticks. Oh, those wondrous Nordic Poles. Lifesavers, if I do say so yet again.

{Green and pleasant land, what-ho?}

{PIG!}

By the time I'd ambled around the park, dodged the traffic and then moseyed home via Wray Mill

then pottered into town to do a quick circuit of the Memorial Park to make up time, I'd clocked up three hours. Rah.

My body is making me well aware of this accomplishment now, though I was also carrying the additional weight of my newly acquired 2L hydration bladder (it's a water bottle, not a catheter, let's just clear that up right now).

By the by... if these accounts have served to convince you as to my dedication to the cause, you can still sponsor me to walk the London 2 Brighton Challenge here or by clicking on the Sponsor Me link in the right sidebar of this blog page. #shamelessplug

Singing "Some day my prints will come"

...in tribute to having ordered £25 worth (eek!) of prints of my NYC photos. Actually, no, that doesn't really elicit an Eek reaction. The NY trip in September last year was a Bucket List item well and truly ticked, and I'm just sorry it's taken me up until now (over five months, what?!) to get my derriere in gear to start properly scrapbooking the whole experience.

{this one's going to be an enlargement,
to be framed!}

And since online photobooks are just too fiddly to assemble and don't really allow for the inclusion of souvenirs, I'm going back to dead trees and glue.

{the excellent travel journal
of Kondo Yoshi, via Pinterest}

Falling ever so slightly in love...

...with Lady Gaga. And here's for why: her blinkin' astounding performance of a Sound of Music medley at the Oscars last weekend:

As my friend AJ so rightly commented, she's wasted in pop. (Ditto Nicole Scherzinger, for that matter although actually Gaga surprised me more.)

Thanks to gorgeous Glenda for posting the Lady Gaga video on Facebook -- it pretty much made my week. Fallen Madonna who now?

{The internet is superb, isn't it?}

Weekly Weblinks

Literary Linkage

• National Book Tokens launches eBook gift card | See, that's just...

{I love this man. #justsaying}

• Why are so many adults reading YA? | Because it's an intelligent genre, maybe? Or we're regressing...
• Dahl and Kinney most read by UK school pupils
• Egmont rebrands Michelle Magorian titles | and they look beautiful

• US publisher Lerner acquires Egmont USA list
• Film adaptation on cards for Where'd You Go Bernadette
• 20 fabulous bookmarks | Thanks to Emma J for sharing

{Hungry hippos!}

• Waterstones recommendations are just getting weird | Bit rude. Still entertaining. 

Non-literary Linkage

• Young children must be protected from ingrained gender stereotypes
• The girl who gets gifts from birds | This is magical
• The Owl Bar: the next hip London thing...?

{Darwin thinks you've had one too many mojitos already...}

• Greedy possum! | Photoshopped? Maybe. (This is from the Daily Fail, nuff said.) Adorbs? Fo' sho'.

"Dude, stick a fork in me, I'm so done... Urrrrrrrrrrrrrrp."

And finally, to play us out...

• LOVE this tribute to 80s teen movies:

On that note, I'm off to dust off my pixie boots and dance off my distaste for adult authority. (Or maybe just watch that Gaga video again.)

Bye-zee-bye!

qb xx

Sunday Summary | Sickbed Special

All right, all right, so in spite of watching four series of House back-to-back, and self-diagnosing, I do not have any of the following: vasculitis, sarcoidosis, amyloidosis, porphyria or lupus (that I know of): I have a cold and possibly a mild chest infection if the vice-like grip of a feeling between my ribs is anything to go by.

But this week's not been the best QB-wise. I don't do ill. Especially when it means I'm now almost a week behind in my training schedule. Not happy! I'm off my game, y'all.

And I'm BB (between books). This looks like the most likely candidate for next-up-to-read, however:

But in between feeling vastly sorry for myself, and perking myself up with OTC drugs (yay Nurofen, boo Superdrug's own-brand-and-highly-ineffectual cold remedies, yay Sudafed and Olbas oil...) I have been:

Singing along to The Sound of Music

...or in my case croaking along. On Friday night an octet of us from the Voicerox family donned habits 

Mother Inferior...

and headscarves and headed over to Dorking Halls for the Sing-along Sound of Music -- there were goodie bags and costume competitions, and a group of rather overconfident children dressed as mini Von Trapps

plus a couple of men who thought it appropriate to whistle shrilly at inopportune intervals. 

Grr... It was fun -- but we weren't bowled over by the fact the Halls had just slapped on the sing-along DVD for us to watch -- the resolution really wasn't great for the amount of money we'd spent to see the film, and it took about half an hour before they raised the volume enough for us to, well, sing along. But we did. And there were actions to the songs, and edelweiss to wave, and hissing and miaowing at the Baroness...

We left during the intermission

having sung to all the good songs, really, and in Sex and the City style, four of us (Glenda, Jos and poor Charlie with her poorly neck and limited, robot mobility -- get better soon, poppet!) holed up in the uber-glam KFC in Dorking to chew the fat (metaphorically and literally -- it was KFC after all...)!

Needless to say I spent yesterday recovering from the exertion of having left the house. And I'm writing this post from the cosy comfort of my bed because, well, I can, and if I need to fall asleep halfway through composing this post, well, again, I can... who's to knkqgjjnnnw,,,,,,adppqjutogjp...

Oops.

Best just move on to...

Weekly Weblinks

Literary Linkage

• Quiz: how big a grammar pedant are you? | Of course I got full marks...
• Waterstones unveils more pleasurable website
• Literary jobs are most desirable
• This is wonderful: Judith Kerr reads part of When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit plus interview
• Jennifer Niven on All the Bright Places

Non-literary Linkage

• Arts and culture being 'systematically removed from UK education system' 
• Also: Concern over 'narrow demographic' accessing arts
• Women shamed for ageing

And finally... 

• Meet Biddy, the travelling hedgehog | Eeeeep! (Thanks to Evie)

Well, I'd best be off to reassess my initial self-diagnosis (pretty sure the remedy is pizza, for whatever it is...) but stay warm and stay well, beautiful people.

qb xx

Sunday Summary (first of 2014, how momentous!)

This week, I have mostly been…

Sleeping

Seriously. It’s been great. Well over eight hours a night, I think. I feel like I’ve got my QB mojo back good and proper.

In between slumber I have also been:

Reading | Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.

Amy and Nick Dunne: have a more unlikeable and dangerous couple ever been committed to print? This was the first book I read in the New Year (on a mission to clock up 50 books this year, did I mention that?...). Let’s hope book number 2 of 50 has me at least rooting for one of the protagonists.

Note to self: Hey, Self, remember you do at some juncture need to review Pride and Prejudice and Two Boys Kissing…

Rewatching | Labyrinth, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins

Ah, David Bowie. Labyrinth is arguably one of my favourite films of all time, ever and ever, amen. I love how he plays Jareth the Goblin King with that delightful, blasé, throwaway edge to him. Makes me love him even more. Despite Jareth’s unnatural obsession with a teenager. Despite the mullet wig and those very tight tights.

This is by far my favourite sequence of the entire film (second favourite has to be the Escher-inspired Within You sequence):

And incidentally, on the subject of that As the World Falls Down masquerade ball sequence, have you seen this recent Louis Vuitton advert featuring Le Bowie? Remarkably derivative of that aforementioned sequence, I’d say.

But in a good way.

As for TSOM and MP, what can I say? Both are Christmas/New Year staples. And 1960s Julie Andrews was just a little bit sublime.

I somehow missed most of Mary Poppins this year up until the Fiduciary Fidelity Bank scene, but I was always left a little bereft by Feed the Birds:

Seeing | Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake @ Sadler’s Wells

This is ballet, Jim, but not as we know it.

I should disclaim, here, that roughly forty-five minutes in, I realised that my scant knowledge of the original story of Swan Lake (by way of Black Swan, to add to my culture-shaming) was moderately redundant.

{Utterly unrelated and highly gratuitous Black Swan trailer, I thank you}

Matthew Bourne has taken the story behind Swan Lake and (according to my cousin who took the initiative to look up the story afterwards!) combined it with elements of Tchaikovsky’s own life, in a moderately contemporary tale of royalty, maternal rejection and exploration of sexuality through freedom (represented by swans, there we go). Or, as Wikipedia would have it, “The plot of the ballet revolves around a young crown prince, his distant mother, and his desire for freedom, represented by a beautiful swan. This scenario is an unofficial interpretation as Matthew Bourne does not believe in scenarios for his productions and prefers the audience to interpret the story for themselves.” {Source}

It’s hard at times to tell when the story is set – but that doesn’t matter, it’s all metaphor.

What does matter is that when those swans dance (and yes, the swans are all danced by men) it’s a spectacle of pure, unbridled masculinity and elegance. (*fans self*) And it’s beautiful to watch. We were in the second row back, close enough to see sweat and hear the orchestrated moments of exhalation, and see every last sinew in motion. Which is never a bad thing, friends.

It isn’t an entirely all-male cast contrary to popular belief – key roles such as the Queen and the Prince’s ‘inappropriate’ girlfriend, and guests at the Royal Ball, are danced by women.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is on at Sadler’s Wells until the end of this month.

Remembering... | that I neglected to post any mention of this little gem of an early-learning book, found in a dear little shop in Cambridge:

Not that I'm obsessed with Jane Eyre or anything (and not that my best friend bought me the 2006 TV series on DVD so I can enjoy more Toby-Stephens-Rochester in the privacy of my own home!)...

Also found on the internet and in the sphere of The Media this week:

Following on from my list of resolutions promises for the year, Stuart Heritage on why New Year's resolutions should be abandoned (made me smile)

Also in the Guardian Weekend, Let's Move to Lydd and New Romney (among my favourite places in the world!)

Children's favourite characters to appear on postage stamps

Puns and word-play -- intelligent fun

It's been just over ten years since Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended on television. Excuse me, what now?! TEN YEARS?! TEN SPIKELESS YEARS?! Ahem. Radio 4's Front Row ran a feature on the legacy of Buffy last week.

...Yes, I listen to Radio 4.

...No, only at my parents' and only after The Archers (which I hear only under duress).

Back to work aka reality tomorrow. 

However:

Christmas does that to you...