Husbands and Sons

Once again, yesterday was super-busy. I guess this is going to be my Saturday pattern! I had French class in the morning -- in which we discussed a new pronoun, en, that I still don't fully understand -- and then a few hours at home before I went to meet my friend Sally on the South Bank of the Thames.

We had dinner at a blustery outdoor food court near the National Theatre, where I had veggie curry on naan bread, and then we drank some hot mulled wine. It wasn't cold out but it was spitting rain and very windy. We walked over to the river and nearly got blown down a couple of times.

We'd met to see a play, "Husbands and Sons," based on the novels and short stories of D. H. Lawrence. It was very good, with a terrific cast, but it left me thankful for modern marriage laws and divorce courts! (Not to mention labor laws, as it took place in a coal-mining town in the English midlands.) There were lots of domestic dramas and tangled emotions and the inevitable industrial accident.

We really are lucky to be living now, you know? It may not always seem like it, with ISIS and Donald Trump and enduring poverty and strife in many parts of the world -- but life is so much better now for so many people. It's hard to conceive of growing up in a coal-mining community (let's say) where virtually your only option is to go down the mine yourself. Most of us can make choices. I understand I'm speaking from a position of relative privilege -- choices may be limited if you're living in a poorer community with lackluster education, or in Somalia or Zimbabwe or Afghanistan -- but it's more true now than it ever has been before. Don't you think?

(Photo: Seen on a recent walk home from work along Finchley Road, North London.)

A Placeholder Post

It's almost 8 a.m. on Saturday, and the dog has just managed to rouse herself from the warm bed, walk down the hallway with her toenails clicking on the wood floor, and announce herself with a yawn. The rest of us have been up for a while. She is the most spoiled dog I've ever seen.

As for me, I got to bed late last night because I was working on my French (38 percent fluent, according to Duolingo!) and wrestling with iMovie to create a special video for an upcoming blog post. You will see soon enough what that's about. Let me just say, iMovie takes a while to figure out, but at least it's intuitive enough that I could mess around with it without any instructions and produce a video.

(Said video does not star me, Dave or Olga, by the way.)

I finished Marie Kondo's book. It got a bit repetitive and I think it could just as easily have been a magazine article, but she did inspire me a bit. I hope to do some purging this weekend. Dave is rolling his eyes.

And now, I gotta run and get a shower before class. Sorry for the perfunctory post, but I'll make up for it soon!

(Photo: Two figures on a building near Oxford Circus.)

Tidying According to Marie

Seeing that it's become such a phenomenon, I bought Marie Kondo's book on "tidying" (a word I hate) for the school library. The kids won't be interested, but the parents, teachers and staff might.

It arrived a few days ago and I've been reading it -- not out of necessity, because I'm habitually pretty neat. I'm just curious about her approach and her success. So far I'm about a third of the way through and my initial take, as I told another blogger pal, is that she's a little bit crazy. Apparently, as a young girl, she was sneaking into her relatives' rooms and closets to throw things away. Throwing out other peoples' possessions crosses a line for me (though I've certainly been tempted).

I think some of her tips are good. The key to her success, it seems to me, is the very Japanese notion of thanking each object for its service before discarding it. This simple tip helps relieve the owner's guilt about throwing the item away. It's an emotional salve that enables the discarding.

We do need a bit of tidying here. Our bookshelf is getting a little out of hand, as is our garden shed, and God knows I'll be glad when the weather warms up enough to put some of these plants back outside. This morning I cleaned off the hall table, where Dave's mail has been accumulating -- he tends to ignore paper mail, so I have to go through it every now and then, and it really is mostly trash. (I guess that counts as discarding another person's stuff but it's not like I'm digging into his wardrobe!)

I have trouble figuring out what to do with my RPS magazine. It's a really nice publication, on nice heavy paper. But I can't save them all -- it would be ridiculous to try. Into the recycling they will go, like all my other magazines, I suppose. Marie would agree!

(Photo: Sprucing up a pub in West Hampstead.)

Ill-Fitting Pants and a Wandering Book

The peculiarities of online commerce just go on and on.

Dave buys almost everything online. He hates going to stores. So I've picked up a bit of that habit myself, but I've found that I don't have great luck in getting exactly what I want. (Witness the Santa Claus pants.)

At the beginning of this school year, for example, I ordered some new pants, a beige pair and a blue pair. When they arrived I realized I had unwittingly ordered "straight fit," or something like that, and I basically felt like my thighs were in sausage casings. (Witness the masochistic torture pants.) I've worn them a couple of times and thought I might just make do. But then at Christmas I bought another pair of pants that are even worse -- I was in a hurry and didn't notice that they're "slim fit," and let's just say while I'm slim, I'm not that slim.

So I've decided all three pairs of these pants are going to charity and I'm starting fresh. My replacement pants -- "traditional fit," which I must remember to order from now on -- arrived this week and they seem much better. (Admittedly I haven't worn them all yet.)

Another odd case of online commerce:

About a month ago, I ordered a used book -- Dennis Cooper's poetry book "The Dream Police" --  from a third-party seller on Amazon. (I'd read about Cooper's book in The New York Times, where director John Waters named it as his favorite book of poetry. It's dark and disturbing and very gay, which is what you'd expect Waters to like, right?) Anyway, the book was sold by a vendor based in Atlanta, Ga.

I was picturing some little bookstore, with dusty shelves, where someone, maybe a kindly librarian-type wearing a cardigan and glasses on a chain, would find the book amid the stacks and wrap it personally and carry it to the post office.

And maybe that's what happened, but the book wasn't mailed to me from Atlanta. It was mailed from St. Louis, Mo. Or at least that's the return address, care of one Rick Martinez, who doesn't sound like he wears glasses on a chain. And to make matters more bizarre, the metered postage is marked "Swiss Post" from Zurich.

So I don't know where the heck this book came from. But it did arrive, yesterday, which I suppose is the important thing. Frankly, and uncharacteristically, I'd forgotten I ordered it.

(Photo: Streetlights in St. John's Wood.)

Beans in a Jar

Here's a broken jar of beans I found on a recent walk to work. Why were there only about eight beans in the jar? Did it come from someone's grocery bag, lunchbox or trash? Very strange.

Speaking of beans in jars, some of you mentioned that you don't understand the American electoral system. Truth be told, most Americans don't understand it either. Caucusing is something that happens in only a few states, and Iowa's caucuses are "more important" because they happen first. But they're also notoriously unreliable as predictors of electoral success, so why everyone gets in such a tizzy about them I don't know.

As for delegates and the Electoral College and all that jazz, well, it's an arcane and probably outdated system. There have been talks of reform but they never go anywhere. And don't even get me on redistricting and the illusion of representative government, in a country where districts are wildly spidery and drawn to boost one or the other (usually the other) party's political advantage.

One of my commenters took Hillary to task yesterday for being more of the same -- essentially a money-grubbing politician beholden to big banks and big pharma. I get it, I do. But I don't think Bernie Sanders would be hugely different. Maybe I'm cynical, but this is the way the system works -- money talks, and not just during election cycles. Big banks and big pharma have the resources to pay for their lobbyists and protect their interests, and that would be true no matter who is in office. Regulating them isn't impossible -- in fact, it's necessary -- but it will always be a political dance.

The biggest problem I have with a Hillary candidacy is having to hear from her opponents about the Republican-manufactured scandal of Benghazi for months and months.

On a lighter note, here's a picture of Olga I stole from the Facebook page of our dog walker. I like to check every now and then to make sure she's appearing in the photos, just so I know she's being walked!

(She usually has a slightly mud-speckled undercarriage when we get home each evening, so I don't think there's any doubt about that.)

Shelley and Iowa

I passed this building on my walk through Soho on Saturday and noticed the blue plaque on the front. In London, blue plaques like these denote buildings of historic or cultural significance. In this case, the plaque says that poet Percy Bysshe Shelley lived here in 1811.

No doubt Vasco and Piero had not yet moved in -- although it looks like they've been there a while, so who knows?

It's kind of funny that the building gets a plaque because Shelley lived there for one year when he was 19. An urban bachelor pad, maybe, or since this was the year of his first marriage, perhaps a starter apartment for the young couple? The plaque doesn't say.

Let me just say: If I ever become famous -- which seems increasingly unlikely -- I'm not sure I want the equivalent of a blue plaque on my first apartment in Tampa, where the downstairs neighbor let her dog poop in her living room, the next-door neighbors fought loudly in Spanish and the guys across the courtyard lounged around in their underwear with the curtains open.

So what do we think about Iowa? My take is this: It doesn't matter much. Among the Republicans, neither Cruz nor Trump are electable in the long run, and my prediction is that history will relegate them to the ranks of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, who also won Iowa in years past. Marco Rubio is the more serious threat to the Democrats, I suspect. And on the Democratic side, Bernie did well -- but as much as I like him, I don't think he's electable either.

This is just the first tally, and it's not representative of the big picture. I think people -- mostly the media -- get way too excited about it. I think ultimately we're going to wind up with Rubio vs. Hillary, and that will be an interesting battle.

A Drizzly Sunday

I looked at the weather forecast yesterday morning -- cloudy, but with zero percent chance of rain. "Oh, good," I thought. "I can take Olga to the Heath."

It proceeded to rain all morning.

Seldom is a forecast so far off the mark.

I spent a few hours on the couch, finishing a novel -- "Fates and Furies" by Lauren Groff, a fascinating and somewhat terrifying depiction of a marriage -- and catching up on other reading. Olga lay in my lap and stared at me with pleading eyes.

Finally, once the drizzle stopped right after lunch, we went to the Heath. It was a mud-bog. I don't know if you can see the path in that top photo, but it has been layered with sticks by people who were trying to give it some kind of foundation. In many places the mud nearly sucked my shoes off my feet.

Olga loved it, though. The two of us were out all afternoon, and it was canine bath time when we got home. She's still exhausted.

Last night Dave and I continued with "Transparent." We're well into Season 2, which required us to buy an Amazon Prime membership. They sucked us right in! In the past I never saw the need for Prime, but maybe now that we have it we'll use it. It's an experiment.