Coffee at the little café next to the place where we both get our hair cut. Maggi has a frappé and J and I Cyprus coffees. Beer, as usual, little more than Nescafé. M has cycled over to her new flat by way of delivering her bike there, preparatory to her move next week,and then walked in to join us. She says twenty minutes, so not at all bad and actually fractionally shorter than our walk to St Lazarus.
We finish reading aloud The Provincial Lady Visits the USSR. I discovered Diary of a Provincial Lady, by E M Delafield, last winter and loved it Circa 1930, it's the lightly fictionalised diary of a middle class woman living iin rural Devonshire and balancing domestic difficulties, family life, friends and unpaid bills with wit and disarming honesty. Apparently it's never been out of print, and was followed by a number of sequels, including the Soviet Union visit we've been reading. This one particularly interesting for its view of the Soviet Union in Stalinist times, only twety years after the revolution - and, incidentally, describing visits to places that we went to ourselves in 1991, in the last weeks of the Soviet Union. Delafield died much too young, in 1943 at the age of 53, which, in a sadly ironic way, has been our good fortune, as books in ost countries are no longer under copyright 70 years after the author's death, so as of 2013 it has become easy, free and legal to download her books onto the book reader. Actually, the Provincial Lady books set in England are equally interesting, in their reflection of a world in which domestic circumstances have changed so much and human nature and relationships so little.
We finish reading aloud The Provincial Lady Visits the USSR. I discovered Diary of a Provincial Lady, by E M Delafield, last winter and loved it Circa 1930, it's the lightly fictionalised diary of a middle class woman living iin rural Devonshire and balancing domestic difficulties, family life, friends and unpaid bills with wit and disarming honesty. Apparently it's never been out of print, and was followed by a number of sequels, including the Soviet Union visit we've been reading. This one particularly interesting for its view of the Soviet Union in Stalinist times, only twety years after the revolution - and, incidentally, describing visits to places that we went to ourselves in 1991, in the last weeks of the Soviet Union. Delafield died much too young, in 1943 at the age of 53, which, in a sadly ironic way, has been our good fortune, as books in ost countries are no longer under copyright 70 years after the author's death, so as of 2013 it has become easy, free and legal to download her books onto the book reader. Actually, the Provincial Lady books set in England are equally interesting, in their reflection of a world in which domestic circumstances have changed so much and human nature and relationships so little.
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