So tell me...

...where does one buy a (preferably not too spendy) top hat?

And a bowler?

Things I didn't say

"In the absence of blogging I have no idea of what's happening in your life."

Well, see, you do. What was happening last time I saw you? I was working a lot. What has my blog been - boringly, repeatedly - complaining about? Working a lot. What is my usual excuse for not blogging? I'm working a lot.

I say this without intended sarcasm or rancour. That's how it is. I'm working. And not on anything that gives me fodder for sparkling conversation or, indeed, blogging. Sorry.

"I feel like we're back at university - I mean, you're still wearing teal! You look just the same!"

I really hate being told I look just the same as I did 10 years ago. It's true, of course (at least if you ignore the inevitable wrinkling, sagging, expanding). I have occasionally cut my hair a bit shorter or coloured it a bit darker or redder, but I always default to the same basic, vaguely oldfashioned look. My clothes are a bit less exotic than they used to be, and a bit less battered and holey, but tend to follow the same silhouette and colours. So I can't complain about being told I look just the same - hey, if I want an image update, that's easy enough to do; but I don't actually want it.

Still, I hate the idea that I haven't progressed. It's been 10 years. That should be enough time to have completely reinvented myself. Yet I'm still just the same, only with less free time, and less conversation.

I feel boring. Really, really, really boring. I like to say I'm in touch with my inner granny, and it's true; I did after all spend most of high school knitting. (I'd like to point out that these days there are plenty of teenagers who knit *and* have a social life, but that wasn't really an option for me, for reasons I won't bore you with.) But I'm not always happy about my basic old-lady-hood. Increasingly I have nothing to say to my friends. All these lovely people, whom I've known for years, who are smart and funny and lively... and with whom I suddenly don't seem to have much in common.

Socialising has become hard work. The London factor (distance and public transport) doesn't help. I hardly ever see most of my friends; but there is another group of people I see a lot more regularly. Some of whom are clearly becoming my new friends. The knitters. There's a huge number of knitting groups around town, and I occasionally manage to make the effort to join some of them. At first I told myself that I was more motivated to join the knitters because I could chalk it up as almost work - it's a networking opportunity, it's market research. Which is true. Then I realised that there's more than that; knitting restores my energy, whereas socialising per se often depletes it. And just this week I realised there's another reason too: among these people, I don't feel boring. I can share the knitting stuff that's taking up so much of my headspace; I don't need anything else. It's enough. It's okay.

The same sort of thing is happening with blogging. I'm struggling to find time for the knitting blog too, but it's a bit more active than this one. Maybe not that much more, but some. Sorry, folks. But look on the bright side. At least I'm not boring you...

PS. It's extremely likely that this feeling explains my unnatural excitement when anyone I know expresses an interest in learning The Knit. Be warned: if you so much as hint at "maybe I'd not hate trying to make a scarf", I go into full pusher mode.

PPS. I am distressed to find out how many tags I already have to suit this post. Sulks, whines and boring! And I haven't even been using tags that long! See? I really have gotten dull.

It might just be because I'm cross-eyed with tired...

...but this had me giggling like Crazy. Crazy Overload. Forget Cute. Just Nuts.




(Our regular programming will recommence, um, sometime. Probably. Just need... sleep...)

Booksbooksbooks

(I got some more free ones, by the way. Oh yes. In fact just today I picked up free audiobooks of Johnny and the Bomb and a few others (Beloved will like those)... and much more excitingly, last week I got the shiny new edition of the Dark is Rising. Yay free books! But I was forced to turnik down the chance to go to not one, but two Leicester Square premieres this week. One of which was Stardust. Gnnnnah.)

Right, em, so what I meant to say was: this is apparently a Librarything list of the most common unread books. Which is a distinctly iffy premise; I'm sure there are squillyuns of unreadable books that remain, thankfully, obscure. But I can't resist posting it because unlike the other such memes I've seen - 100 best scifi novels and the like; you will note that you've never seen such a list on this blog, and now you know why - in this list, I think there'll be a fair bit of bold type.

Bold = read, italics = started but not finished, strikethrough = couldn't stand.

# Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
# Anna Karenina
# Crime and punishment
# Catch-22
# One hundred years of solitude
# Wuthering Heights
# Life of Pi : a novel
# The name of the rose
# Don Quixote
# Moby Dick
# Ulysses
# Madame Bovary
# The Odyssey
# Pride and prejudice
# Jane Eyre
# A tale of two cities [currently sort of halfheartedly reading]
# The brothers Karamazov
# Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
# War and peace
# Vanity fair [unless you mean the magazine...?]
# The time traveler’s wife
# The Iliad
# Emma
# The Blind Assassin
# The kite runner
# Mrs. Dalloway
# Great expectations
# American gods : a novel
# A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
# Atlas shrugged
# Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
# Memoirs of a Geisha
# Middlesex
# Quicksilver
# Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West …
# The Canterbury tales [bits of, English class]
# The historian : a novel
# A portrait of the artist as a young man
# Love in the time of cholera
# Brave new world
# The Fountainhead
# Foucault’s pendulum
# Middlemarch
# Frankenstein
# The Count of Monte Cristo
# Dracula
# A clockwork orange
# Anansi boys : a novel
# The once and future king [don't ask me why I didn't finish it, I really don't know]
# The grapes of wrath
# The poisonwood Bible : a novel
# 1984
# Angels & demons [and PROUD]
# The inferno
# The satanic verses
# Sense and sensibility
# The picture of Dorian Gray
# Mansfield Park
# One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
# To the lighthouse
# Tess of the D’Urbervilles
# Oliver Twist
# Gulliver’s travels
# Les misérables
# The corrections
# The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel
# The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
# Dune
# The prince
# The sound and the fury
# Angela’s ashes : a memoir
# The god of small things
# A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
# Cryptonomicon [but it's on my shelf, awaiting its turn]
# Neverwhere
# A confederacy of dunces
# A short history of nearly everything
# Dubliners
# The unbearable lightness of being
# Beloved : a novel
# Slaughterhouse-five
# The scarlet letter
# Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
# The mists of Avalon
# Oryx and Crake : a novel
# Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
# Cloud atlas : a novel
# The confusion
# Lolita
# Persuasion
# Northanger abbey
# The catcher in the rye
# On the road
# The hunchback of Notre Dame
# Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of…
# Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance : an inquiry into …
# The Aeneid
# Watership Down
# Gravity’s rainbow
# In cold blood [but I don't remember it At All]
# White teeth
# Treasure Island
# David Copperfield
# The three musketeers
# Cold mountain
# Robinson Crusoe
# The bell jar
# The secret life of bees
# Beowulf : a new verse translation
# The plague
# The Master and Margarita
# Atonement
# The handmaid’s tale
# Lady Chatterley’s lover
# Underworld
# Little Women
# A brief history of time : from the big bang to black holes
# Stardust
# Jude the obscure
# The chronicles of Narnia
# Possession : a romance
# Fast food nation : the dark side of the all-American meal
# Never let me go
# The trial
# Kafka on the shore
# Bleak House
# Sons and lovers
# Alias Grace
# The Arabian nights [um, the kids version or the Victorian translation or, like, which one?]
# Baudolino
# Confessions
# The great Gatsby
# To kill a mockingbird
# Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass [I think we all knew that one...]
# The alchemist
# Candide, or, Optimism
# Snow falling on cedars
# Midnight in the garden of good and evil : a Savannah story
# Midnight’s children
# White Oleander
# A passage to India
# The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and …
# The house of the seven gables
# The lovely bones : a novel
# Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
# The amber spyglass
# The histories
# Swann’s way
# The shadow of the wind
# Fahrenheit 451
# Good omens
# Running with scissors : a memoir
# Everything is illuminated : a novel
# The divine comedy
# Paradise lost
# The English patient
# Uncle Tom’s cabin
# The Origin of Species

Cape Town in lists

Holiday disasters (little ones):
Forgetting my work permit and changing my ticket.
Realising (much, much later) that I could have travelled anyway and gotten the World's Best Housesitter to courier that damn work permit to me in Cape Town.
Attempted car theft, and subsequent locksmithery.
Completely unnecessary little prang a mere 100m from our destination, as we were ferrying the bride and groom to their hotel after the ceremony.

Random dull airport observations:
In London they make you take off your shoes, put all your liquids into a ziplock, and get patted down rather intimately. (Since their metal detectors are sensitive enough to get set off by oh, say, the button of your jeans, this is pretty much a given.)
In Madrid they do the same, but they give you little plastic foot baggies to walk in. It's rather mystifying why they bother since you've just been ferried directly from the plane from London. Where are you supposed to have picked up contraband, exactly?
In Joburg and in Cape Town, they really don't care.
Joburg international terminal is waaaaay less nice than domestic.
South African airports generally are severely lacking in food options.
Madrid airport loos are rather nice.

Wildlife spotted:
Dassies, elephantlike (not really)
Zebra, stripey
Quagga, zebralike
Squirrels, tame, handfed
Egyptian goose, tame, handfed
Tortoiseseses, crunchy (apparently)
Southern right whales, lots and lots
Some other whale, I dunno, it was grey
Dolphin, don't ask me what kind
Eland, big
Kudu, tasty
Wildebeest, also big
Springbok, bouncy
Some more bokkies
Some other bokkies
Some bigger bokkies
Some smaller bokkies
Ostriches, with babies
Guineafowl, fast
Seagulls, noisy
Bunch more birds, I dunno, the flying kind.

People spotted:
The dreaded jo&stv duo (excellent blomme-spotting, torty-crunching and picnic-eating (and, er providing) companions, btw)
Extemporanea
Phleep and Firstfallen
Wolverine Nun
Mother
Other mother
Uncle
Erich
Sister&swaer&nephew&niece
Konni&Dylan
Assorted aunts, uncles and cousins
Assorted other cousins
Oh, some more cousins
Cousin A's boyfriend
Cousin B's girlfriend
Cousin C's boyfriend
Grandparents, two
Lauren & her mother
Juleen&Chris&Jeffrey
Cara&Barry, aka THE NEWLYWEDS
Tanya&Jem&Sophia, aka THE BREEDERS
Andre&Erna&Chloe, aka THE OTHER BREEDERS
Anna Maria&lovely new man, yay, about bloody time etc (sorry, is that rude?)
Mike
Janita&Russell
Martha&Herr Dokter
A bunch of other wedding guests, lovely folk all but dear lord I'd be here all day.

People not spotted:
A surprisingly large number. Possibly you. I'm really sorry.

People in the above list who do not have animals:
Cara&Barry, who are allergic
Tanya&Jem&Sophia
Konni&Dylan (Dylan is four)
Sister&family
Possibly Wolverine Nun, I dunno, I didn't ask.

Conclusions:
a) SA is a much nicer place because there are more animals.
b) Small children are an impediment to keeping animals.
c) Don't breed.

Food for thought that may or may not lead to future blog posts:
SA newspapers. Small, but full of funny names. And stories that sound bizarrely familiar... from 15 or 20 years ago. And political parties that sound like the plot ingredients of a farce set in an obscure South American republic.
Cape Town may fairly be compared to a stop on Ulysses' journey: true or false?
Families: can't be trusted to stay put. You turn around for one minute, next thing you know you've lost a busty blonde surfer chick and gained a punky vegan lesbian. Honestly.
Exile, as a concept, is intrinsic to the Cape Town experience.
As a matter of some national urgency, all decaffeinated coffee in the Cape Peninsula needs to be replaced with full-caff.
Biological clock on yellow alert: babies are starting to look cute to me. Or at least, marginally less freakish. Also, everyone is doing it, and hence starting to make breeding look normal. This is wrong and shouldn't be allowed.

Finally
I admit it's cherry, and sweet, and not as good as the Kriek bier you get in Belgo's, but really, I think "sudden death" is a bit much. There is nothing Xtreme about this beer. It's not even extreme. I fail to understand.


For actual holiday pictures, go here. Or wait till Beloved's are up. They'll be a lot better. A lot.